Energy markets and energy-intensive industries in all EU member states – especially in Germany – are subject to a diverse set of policies related to climate change. We analyse the potential efficiency losses from simultaneous application of emission taxes and emissions trading in qualitative...

The allocation of emissions entitlements across countries is the single most controversial issue in international climate policy. Extreme positions within the policy debate range from entitlement based on current emission patterns (CEP) to equal-per-capita (EPC) allocations.Convergence (COV)...

In the tax policy debate, differentiation of value-added taxes is often justified by distributional concerns. Our quantitative analysis for Germany indicates that such concerns are misplaced. We find that the abolition of VAT differentiation has only negligible redistributive effects. Instead,...

This paper presents an applied general equilibrium model for Germany. The model integrates specific labour market institutions in an otherwise standard general equilibrium framework. There are sectoral wage negotiations for two skill types of workers between firms and trade unions. The...

From 1 January 2005 onwards the European Union has launched the first largescale international carbon emissions trading program. As the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) covers only part of domestic carbon emissions, it implies a hybrid environmental regulation scheme: Each EU Member State...

Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...

To meet its commitment under the Kyoto Protocol, the EU plans to implement an emissions trading system with grandfathering of allowances. Besides having distributional impacts, the choice of the grandfathering scheme may affect efficiency if firms anticipate how future allocations depend on...

In 2005, an EU-wide emissions trading scheme covering major CO2 producing sites shall come into power. The key objective of the trading scheme is to promote cost-efficiency of carbon reduction within the EU. We identify policy-relevant tradeoffs between overall efficiency, compensation and...

Implementation of an EU-wide emissions trading system by means of National Allocation Plans is at the core of European environmental policy agenda. Member States are faced with the problem of allocating their national emission budgets under the EU Burden Sharing Agreement between...

Starting in 2005, the EU will implement a CO2 emissions trading scheme. In this paper we show that the outspoken goals of economic efficiency and free allocation of allowances are incompatible with harmonized allocation rules. In general, the assignment of allowances is endogenous and differs...