Topic Markets

Do Rent Controls and Other Tenancy Regulations Affect New Construction? Some Answers from Long-Run Historical Evidence

Local Energy Markets

In current power markets, the bulk of electricity is sold wholesale and transported to consumers via long-distance transmission lines. Recently, decentralized local energy markets have evolved, often as isolated networks based on solar generation. We analyze strategic pricing, investment, and welfare in local energy markets. We show that local energy markets yield competitive equilibrium prices and ...

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 resulting from the Russian-Ukrainian war has shifted the energy policy debate toward the question of how consumers can benefit more from the low and stable generation costs of renewable electricity. Here we suggest a Renewable Pool (“RE-Pool”) under ...

Rent Control, Market Segmentation, and Misallocation: Causal Evidence from a Large-Scale Policy Intervention

This paper studies market segmentation that arises from the introduction of rent control. When a part of the market remains unregulated, theory predicts an increase of free-market rents due to the misallocation of households to dwellings. To document this mechanism empirically, we study a large-scale policy intervention in the German housing market. We isolate the misallocation mechanism by exploiting ...

Have the Effects of Shocks to Oil Price Expectations Changed? Evidence from Heteroskedastic Proxy Vector Autoregressions

Studies of the crude oil market based on structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models typically assume a time-invariant model and transmission of shocks and possibly allow for heteroskedasticity by using robust inference procedures. We assume a heteroskedastic reduced-form VAR model with time-invariant slope coefficients and explicitly consider the possibility of time-varying shock transmission due ...

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares ...

The Hidden Homeownership Welfare State: An International Long-term Perspective on the Tax Treatment of Homeowners

Welfare is traditionally understood as social security decommodifying labour markets or as social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes’ fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this article introduces a novel yearly database of 37 countries between 1901 and 2020 to uncover the “hidden welfare state” of ...

Hicks in HANK: Fiscal Responses to an Energy Shock

The distributional and disruptive effects of energy supply shocks are potentially large. We study the effectiveness of alternative fiscal responses in a two-country HANK model that we calibrate to the euro area. Energy subsidies can stabilize the domestic economy, but are fiscally costly and generate adverse spillovers to the rest of the monetary union: What the subsidizing country gains, the other ...

The Impact of the Tax Reduction on Fuel Prices in Germany: A Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Approach

We analyse the impact of the temporary tax reduction on diesel and gasoline prices from June to the end of August 2022 in Germany. By implementing a synthetic difference-in-differences approach with different baskets of European countries, we find a significant reduction in prices by 33.8–34.4 cents per litre for gasoline and 12.2–14.6 cents per litre for diesel. These results are robust to variations ...

The Price of Natural Gas Dependency: Price Shocks, Inequality, and Public Policy

The 2022 natural gas price spikes across Europe raised concerns regarding their distributional consequences. This paper investigates the distributional effect of price increases between and, in particular, within different income groups in Germany, accounting for different determinants of gas expenditures. The study finds that low-income households are affected the most by the gas price increase. Low-income ...