The adoption rate of building energy standards in the US has been increasing since the mid1990s as a result of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPAct). However, most of the evidence on the energy savings that accrue from commercial building energy standards is based on engineering simulations, which do not account for realized behavior once a standard is actually adopted. This paper uses plausibl...

Using panel data on investment of firms in energy saving technology, we measure the impact of the payback period of the technology on the probability to adopt the technology in the absence of tax and subsidy incentives. We find that the decision rules to adopt energy saving technology differs substantially between different types of firms, i.e. for-profit/notfor-profit as the decision to adopt ...

Labor Demand Effects of Rising Electricity Prices: Evidence for Germany Germany plays a pioneering role in replacing conventional power plants with renewable energy sources. While this is beneficial with respect to environmental quality, the energy turnaround implies increasing electricity prices for private households and firms. The extent to which this is associated with negative impacts on e...

Much attention in recent years has turned to the potential of behavioural insights to improve the performance of government policy. One behavioural concept of interest is the effect of a cash transfer label on how the transfer is spent. The Winter Fuel Payment (WFP) is a labelled cash transfer to offset the costs of keeping older households warm in the winter. Previous research has shown that h...

In this paper we investigate the introduction of an export tax on steam coal levied by an individual country (Australia), or a group of major exporting countries. The policy motivation would be twofold: generating tax revenues against the background of improved terms-of-trade, while CO2 emissions are reduced. We construct and numerically apply a two-level game consisting of an optimal policy pr...

Governments around the world provide direct capital subsidies for solar energy technology adoption in order to lessen the externalities associated with fossil energy consumption. This paper analyses the efficiency of the largest customer-oriented program in the U.S., the $2 billion California Solar Initiative upon which programs in other states are modeled. An analytical model identifies limite...

Renewable electricity policies promote investment in renewable electricity generators and have become increasingly common around the world. Because of intermittency and the composition of other generators in the power system, the value of certain renewables—particularly wind and solar—varies across locations and technologies. This paper investigates the implications of this heterogeneity for th...

This econometric study assesses the efficiency of the income tax credit system implemented in France in 2005 on households’ retrofitting investment decisions, focusing on insulation measures. A logit model with random individual effects is estimated using an unbalanced panel of 23,879 households surveyed over the period 2002‐2011. An estimation in difference is p...

The use of long-term contracts in the procurement of coal for electricity generation is common. The data that is observed from contracts and their transactions are from different levels of the pricing process. Contracts contain the parameters by which all future deliveries are structured, specifying the length of the agreement and acceptable coal attributes. Based on these parameters, a price i...

This paper investigates how uncertainty affects the optimal intertemporal accumulation of a stock externality using CO2 emissions and the greenhouse effect as a topical pars pro toto. More precisely, the evolution of the future temperature is assumed to follow an Itô-process with the drift provided by current carbon-dioxide emissions. In this context, the paper emphasizes two different kinds of...