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North American Natural Gas Model: Impact of Cross-Border Trade with Mexico

Natural gas gained significant attention due to its low carbon emissions and competitive prices in North America relative to other energy sources. The Annual Energy Outlook 2015 projects the U.S. as a net exporter by 2017. Recently, Mexico launched its energy reform, aiming to expand domestic production by opening the market to private investors. The success or failure of these policy changes will ...

Too Much of a Good Thing? A Theory of Short-Term Debt as a Sorting Device

This paper shows that the liquidity risk associated with short-term debt financing can be used to sort insolvent firms out of financial markets when their solvency risk is private information. Notwithstanding this sorting role of short-term debt, unregulated financial firms tend to choose an inefficiently short debt maturity structure. This inefficiency arises for two reasons. First, by issuing more ...

The Macroeconomic Risks of Undesirably Low Inflation

This paper investigates the macroeconomic risks associated with undesirably low inflation using a medium-sized New Keynesian model. We consider different causes of persistently low inflation, including a downward shift in long-run inflation expectations, a fall in nominal wage growth, and a favorable supply-side shock. We show that the macroeconomic effects of persistently low inflation depend crucially ...

On the Emissions–Inequality and Emissions–Welfare Trade-Offs in Energy Taxation: Evidence on the German Car Fuels Tax

By using estimates from a Demographically-Scaled Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System (DQUAIDS), we investigate how the German car fuels tax changes the private households’ CO2 emissions, living standards, and post-tax income distribution. Our results show that the tax implies a trade-off between the aim to reduce emissions and vertical equity, which refers to the idea that people with a greater ability ...

The Effectiveness of a Strategic Reserve in the Presence of a High Portfolio Share of Renewable Energy Sources

To ensure sufficient investment in electricity generation capacity, mechanisms such as strategic reserves are being considered or already implemented. We analyze the effectiveness of a strategic reserve in the presence of a growing portfolio share of renewable energy sources (RES) with EMLab-Generation, an agent-based electricity market model. A strategic reserve can stabilize investment, but within ...

The Economics of the EU ETS Market Stability Reserve: Introduction

Short-Run Fuel Price Responses: At the Pump and on the Road

We provide evidence that motorists respond to short-run fluctuations in fuel prices at the gas pump and not on the road. Employing variants of censored panel regression to control for censoring of the dependent variable, we find that the fuel price has a negative impact on the quantity of fuel purchased, but no consistently significant impact on the subsequent distance driven until the next refill. ...

FTR Allocations to Ease Transition to Nodal Pricing: An Application to the German Power System

A shift from zonal to nodal pricing improves the efficiency of system operation. However, resulting price changes also shift surplus across generation and loads at different locations. As individual actors can lose, they might oppose any reform. We explore how allocation of financial transmission rights can be used to mitigate the distributional impact. The fundamental effects with regard to reference ...

Two Price Zones for the German Electricity Market: Market Implications and Distributional Effects

e discuss the implications of two price zones (i.e., one northern and one southern bidding area) on the German electricity market. In the northern zone, continuous increases in capacity with low variable costs cause large regional supply surpluses in the market dispatch, while in the southern zone conventional capacity decreases. As the spatial imbalance of supply and load is increasing, the current ...

Resource Curse Contagion in the Case of Yemen

This study analyses the economic developments in Yemen from the 1970s to today in the context of the resource curse hypothesis. After a brief survey of the resource curse literature, using empirical data, historical accounts, and political (economic) analyses, I confirm that post-reunification Yemen suffers from an intense oil curse. The curse is evidenced by low genuine savings rates, oil-dependency, ...