Topic Resource Markets

Environmentally-Responsible Households: Irresponsible Corporate Lobbying

How do firms respond to greener household preferences? We construct a novel index of environmental willingness to act on the state-quarter level based on Google Trends search data. Relating the index to firm-level information on the U.S. auto- motive sector from 2006 to 2019, we find ambiguous results. On average, firms innovate more in electric, hydrogen, and hybrid (clean) technologies and reduce ...

Is Russian Gas Still Needed in the European Union? Model-Based Analysis of Long-Term Scenarios

Aligned with the war in Ukraine, Russia has significantly withheld natural gas exports to Europe since 2021. As there are no EU-wide sanctions on imports of Russian natural gas, the Ukraine transit as well as imports via Turkey and LNG have remained active during 2022–24. However, the Russian-Ukrainian transit agreement expires at the end of 2024 and discussions about new sanctions on natural gas as ...

Contracting Matters: Hedging Producers and Consumers With a Renewable Energy Pool

Renewable energy installations are rapidly gaining market share due to falling technology costs and supportive policies. Meanwhile, the energy price crisis in 2022 shifted the energy policy debate toward the question of how consumers can better benefit from the low and stable generation costs of renewable electricity. Long-term contracts for renewable energy to link producers and consumers are an option ...

Demand Response Within the Irish Wastewater Treatment Sector: Analysing Flexibility Potentials of the Aeration Process and Wastewater Pumping Within an Integrated Energy–Water System Model

Significant amounts of electricity consumed in air and water pumping make wastewater treatment energy-intensive. This study investigates the potential power system benefits of load shifting within these pumping processes. As a case study, the Irish power system and wastewater sector are studied by using an integrated modelling approach. The results show that demand flexibility within the wastewater ...

Open-source modelling of the future role of renewable hydrogen in Germany and Europe

The final workshop of the Einstein research project “Open-Source Modeling of the Role of Renewable Hydrogen in Germany and Europe” will take place as part of this year's InfraDay, a free conference organized annually by TU Berlin. The research project (project website) has been running since November 2021 and will be completed at the end of October. The aim of the project, which was carried out...

Loss of Russian natural gas can be compensated for

Does a Fair Transition Reduce Efficiency? Essays on the Distributional Effects of Energy and Climate Policy

Für Länder auf der ganzen Welt stellt der Übergang zur Klimaneutralität eine Chance für Wirtschaftswachstum und Wohlstand dar. Gleichzeitig haben die Transformation der Wirtschaft und die mit ihr einhergehenden Staatsausgaben wichtige verteilungspolitische Implikationen. Die politischen Debatten um Energie- und Klimapolitik zeigen, wie wichtig es ist, diese verteilungspolitischen Implikationen zu verstehen, ...

Trade Effects of Carbon Pricing Policies

Policies that affect the cost of using fossil fuels in production have a complex impact on the economy. In this paper, we focus on the role of these policies for the pattern of comparative advantage through their effect on production costs in manufacturing industries. Using data on carbon prices and fossil fuel subsidies, we show that less stringent carbon pricing policies increase comparative advantage ...

Sufficiency as a “Strategy of the Enough”: Curbing Ecological Crises and Injustices: A Summary of the German Advisory Council on the Environment’s Discussion Paper

A recent discussion paper Sufficiency as a “Strategy of the Enough”: A Necessary Debate by the German Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) aims to intensify the debate on sufficiency, a central but neglected element of future-oriented policy. It defines sufficiency as the need to limit the consumption and production of ecologically critical goods and services, mainly by the economically rich, ...

VAT Pass-through and Competition: Evidence from the Greek Islands

We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we investigate how changes in VAT rates are passed through to consumers in islands with different market structure. We show that pass-through increases with competition, going from 50% in monopoly to around 80% ...