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 ...
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 ...
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...
We examine the impact of a disclosure mandate for greenhouse gas emissions on firms’ subsequent emission levels and financial operating performance. For UK-incorporated listed firms a carbon disclosure mandate was adopted in 2013. Our difference-in-differences design shows that firms affected by the mandate reduced their emissions by about 8% relative to a control group of European firms. At the same ...
To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, it is necessary for industrialized countries to support developing countries financially. The channels and mechanisms under which this support would be provided are known as International Climate Finance. Building upon expert interviews with a focus on the industrial sector, this report analyses the different areas of International Climate Finance and ...
For Europe to reach climate neutrality by mid-century, it needs to move toward a circular economy. Waste avoidance, reuse, and recycling save primary resources and avoid emissions in the production of basic materials like steel, cement, and plastics. Without exploring circular economy potentials, switching production to climate-neutral processes alone would result in significant costs and tremendous ...
This paper tests the independence property under the Coase Theorem in a large multinational cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gas emissions, the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). I analyze whether emissions of power producers regulated under the EU ETS are independent from allowance allocations, leveraging a change in allocation policy for a difference-in-differences strategy. The evidence suggests ...