Renewable energy communities (RECs) are prominent initiatives to provide end consumers an active role in the sector, raise awareness on importance of renewable (RE) technologies and increase their share system thus reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The economic viability RECs though, depends multiple interdependent factors that require careful examination for each individual context. Thi...

We examine in detail the circumstances under which reciprocity, as defined in Bagwell and Staiger (1999), leads to fixed world prices. We show that a change of tariffs satisfying reciprocity does not necessarily imply constant world prices in a world of many goods and countries. While it is possible to find tariff reforms that are consistent with both reciprocity and constant world prices (as B...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization in terms of tariff cuts within the Eastern European enlargement on German and Austrian firm productivity. Unique matching of data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that tariff reductions raise parent firm productivity significantly. A ten percentage point decrease in tariff rates can lead to total factor productivity gains of up to 2 percent. The d...

We model international trade in renewable resources between a single buyer and competitive sellers as a Stackelberg differential game. The buyer uses unit and ad valorem tariffs to indirectly encourage conservation of the renewable resource under study. First, we show that the efficacy of these trade policy instruments in promoting conservation depends fundamentally on whether harvesting costs ...

Recent research has underlined the efficiency of the GATT/WTO rules from the standpoint of politically motivated governments, emphasizing that the current multilateral rules are capable of delivering a politically efficient equilibrium. Such an equilibrium is, however, economically inefficient. Global free trade, in particular, is generally unattainable even in a fully cooperative world, provid...

In many service industries, firms introduce three-part tariffs to replace or complement existing two-part tariffs. As opposed to two-part tariffs, three-part tariffs offer allowances, or “free” units of the service. Behavioral research suggests that the attributes of a pricing plan may affect behavior beyond their direct cost implications. There is evidence that customers value “free” units abo...

Current electricity tariffs do not reflect the real cost that customers incur to suppliers, as units are charged at the same rate, regardless of how predictable each customer’s consumption is. A recent proposal to address this problem are prediction-of-use tariffs. In such tariffs, a customer is asked in advance to predict her future consumption, and is charged based both on her actual consumpt...

In recent years, firms in a number of industries have introduced wide menus of pricing plans that grant access to a virtually identical product under different pricing schemes. These menus of tariffs allow consumers to self-select into the tariff that best fits their demand. They include pure pay-per-use tariffs, tariffs where the consumer pays an access price, and a marginal price only for usa...

The majority of research to date investigating strategic tariffs in the presence of multinationals finds a knife-edge result where, in equilibrium, all foreign firms are either multinationals or exporters. Utilizing a model of heterogeneous firms, we find equilibria in which both pure exporters and multinationals coexist. We utilize this model to study the case of endogenously chosen tariffs. A...