For many years now, nitrate concentrations have exceeded the trigger value of 50 milligrams per liter at nearly one-fifth of the groundwater sampling sites in Germany. Apart from impairing the ecosystem by, for example, causing eutrophication of water bodies, nitrate-polluted drinking water also damages human health; it is suspected to cause cancer. Econometric calculations using current data confirm ...
This paper studies the impact of financial investments on agricultural futures prices, using structural vector autoregressions. We identify exogenous variation in net long positions of speculators through heteroskedasticity. We first show that demand shocks of both index investors and noncommercial traders lead to a statistically significant contemporaneous increase in futures prices. We then quantify ...
The European Green Deal includes the goal of enshrining the long-term objective of climate neutrality by 2050 in legislation and increasing the EU’s climate by 2030. In this context, the Green Deal emphasized that “should differences in levels of ambition worldwide persist, as the EU increases its climate ambition, the Commission will propose a carbon border adjustment mechanism, for...
Fair Trade certification aims at transferring wealth from the consumer to the farmer; however, coffee passes through many hands before reaching final consumers. Bringing together retail, wholesale, and stock market data, this study estimates how much more consumers are paying for Fair Trade-certified coffee in US supermarkets and finds estimates around $1.50 per lb. The study then assesses how this ...
While the economic voting hypothesis is a well-researched approach to explain behavior at the ballot box, a broader perspective of economic, social and environmental issues regarding a government’s chances to get re-elected is still missing in the literature. In this context, this paper makes use for the first time of the Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the comprehensive ...
This paper provides an empirical test of the Coase Theorem. I analyze whether emissions are independent from allowance allocations in the electricity sector regulated under the EU's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). Exogenous variation in levels of free allocation for power producing installations enables a difference-in-differences strategy. The analysis reveals that a change in al- location levels ...
Diese Dissertation befasst sich mit den Auswirkungen von Luftverschmutzung und Naturkatastrophen auf verschiedene Aspekte der menschlichen Umwelt. Im ersten Abschnitt konzentriere ich mich auf die Luftverschmutzung. Konkret stelle ich in Kapitel 2 fest: Die stündlichen Veränderungen der Luftverschmutzung wirken sich über zwei verschiedene Wege auf die Kriminalität aus, und zwar über physiologische ...