Topic Resource Markets

Carbon Pricing of Basic Materials: Incentives and Risks for the Value Chain and Consumers

For the European Union to realise its ambition of carbon neutrality, emissions from basic material production need to be reduced through low-carbon production processes, material efficiency and substitution, as well as enhanced recycling. Different reform options for the EU ETS are discussed that ensure a consistent carbon price incentive for all these mitigation options, while avoiding the risk of ...

A Real Chance for Transatlantic Partnership on Climate Policy

A Retrospective Study of State Aid Control in the German Broadband Market

We provide an evaluation of the impact of German public subsidy schemes in municipalities of Bavaria and Lower Saxony aimed at supporting the deployment of basic broadband infrastructure in rural Germany. Such subsidies are subject to state aid control by the European Commission and may only be granted if the potential market failure is addressed without distorting competition. We first analyse the ...

Quantifying the Externalities of Renewable Energy Plants Using Wellbeing Data: The Case of Biogas

Although there is strong support for renewable energy plants, they are often met with local resistance. We quantify the externalities of renewable energy plants using well-being data. We focus on the example of biogas, one of the most frequently deployed technologies besides wind and solar. To this end, we combine longitudinal household data with novel panel data on more than 13, 000 installations ...

Market Concentration in Europe: Evidence from Antitrust Markets

An increasing body of empirical evidence is documenting trends toward rising concentration, profits, and markups in many industries around the world since the 1980s. Two major criticisms of these studies is that concentration and market shares are poorly measured at the national industry level while firm level revenues are a poor indicator of product sales. We use a novel database that identifies over ...

A Retrospective Evaluation of the GDF/Suez Merger: Effects on the Belgian Gas Hub

We present an ex-post analysis of the effects of GDF's acquisition of Suez in 2006, which created one of the world's largest energy companies. We perform a series of econometric analyses on the market for trading at the Zeebrugge gas hub in Belgium. Removing barriers to entry and facilitating access to the hub through ownership unbundling were an important part of the objectives of the remedies imposed ...

Optimal Discounts in Green Public Procurement

We consider a Green Public Procurement setting where the procurer provides a bid discount to environment-friendly technologies to foster their use. We assume that, before the auction, firms may switch to green technology via a publicly observable costly investment. We show that investment acts as a signaling device. This mitigates the effect of incomplete information on firms’ costs, thereby triggering ...

Fossil Natural Gas Exit – A New Narrative for the European Energy Transformation towards Decarbonization

This paper discusses the potential role of fossil natural gas in the process of the energy transformation in Europe on its way to decarbonization. Mainstream conventional wisdom has it that natural gas, perhaps in combination with other gases, should maintain an important role in the energy mix, first, as a "bridge fuel", and then through a gradual transition toward "decarbonized gases". However, when ...

Mexico and U.S. Power Systems under Variations in Natural Gas Prices

This study examines the impact of natural gas prices on the power systems of Mexico and the United States. For this, we develop an integrated modeling framework by soft linking three different techno-economic bottom-up models of the power and energy systems, one partial equilibrium model of the natural gas sector, and a partial equilibrium model of the Mexican energy sector. Our results show several ...

Estimating Demand with Multi-Homing in Two-Sided Markets

We empirically investigate the relevance of multi-homing in two-sided markets. First, we build a micro-founded structural econometric model that encompasses demand for differentiated products and allows for multi-homing on both sides of the market. We then use an original dataset on the Italian daily newspaper market that includes information on double-homing by readers to estimate readers’ and advertisers’ ...