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 ...
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...
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 ...
To internalize pollution externalities into household waste generation, Unit Pricing Systems (UPS) have been adopted worldwide. This paper evaluates the causal effects of a UPS on the disposal of municipal solid waste in Trento, Italy. Using a unique panel dataset of monthly waste generation in Italian municipalities, we employ the synthetic control method, which allows us to account for possible time-varying ...
The nuclear industry in the United States of America has accumulated about 70,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste over the past decades; at present, this waste is temporarily stored close to the nuclear power plants. The industry and the Department of Energy are now facing two related challenges: (i) will a permanent geological repository, e.g., Yucca Mountain, become available in the future, ...
In this paper, we analyse the effects of a unilateral change in an emissions tax in a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms. We find a positive effect of tighter environmental policy on average productivity in the reforming country through reallocation of labour towards exporting firms. Domestic aggregate emissions fall, due to both a scale and a technique effect, but we show that the ...
The need to realise sustainable economic development, which preserves the basis for human existence, is now widely recognised. Natural resources must be used more economically and the burden on the environment eased. The traditional instruments of environmental policy, in particular the use of regulatory law dominant in Germany, are inadequate for this purpose and induce economic costs which are unnecessarily ...
by Stefan Bach, Hermann Buslei, Michelle Harnisch and Niklas Isaak The ecological tax reform that Germany implemented between 1999 and 2003 increased energy tax rates—especially on gasoline and diesel. Today, the ecological tax hikes yield an annual revenue of around 20 billion euros or 0.6 percent of GDP. The money is used to finance a higher federal grant to the public pension scheme. Calculations ...
The loss of international competitiveness of domestic industries remains a key obstacle to the implementation of effective carbon prices in a world without harmonized climate policies. We analyze countries' non-cooperative choices of emissions taxes under imperfect competition and mobile polluting firms. In our general equilibrium setup with trade, wage effects prevent all firms from locating in the ...
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