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 ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
Die Verknüpfung von zwei oder mehr Cap-and-Trade-Systemen – „Linking“ – verspricht Kostenvorteile und signalisiert ein starkes Engagement für die gemeinsame Klimapolitik. Linking wird auch als eine mögliche Option angesehen, um von vereinzelten regionalen Initiativen zu einer globalen klimapolitischen Architektur zu konvergieren. Darüber hinaus kann Linking genutzt werden, um Investitionen in klimafreundliche ...
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 ...
Like many other countries, Germany has defined goals to reduce its CO2-emissions following the Paris Agreement of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP). The first successes in decarbonizing the electricity sector were already achieved under the German Energiewende. However, further steps in this direction, also concerning the heat and transport sectors, have stalled. This paper describes three possible ...
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