Biofuels are promoted by politics in more and more countries worldwide. This is being justified by positive effects on the climate, energy, and agricultural policy. The paper describes the current and future markets for biofuels and the existing biofuel programs in single countries. It analyzes...

To justify substantial emission reductions, recent literature on cost-benefit analysis of climate change suggests discounting environment consumption with an environmental discount rate instead of a consumption discount rate that is usually used in cost-benefit analysis. The present study...

The 'deforestation problem' in Brazil consists of a variety of interrelated issues, of which this paper identifies a regional, sectoral and macroeconomic dimension. Using a regionally and sectorally disaggregated general equilibrium model of Brazil, it is shown that macroeconomic reform is...

Nationally implemented protected area measures for biodiversity conservation generate cross-border externalities. For internalizing these externalities at the international level, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has been established as a multilateral mechanism of transfer. This paper...

The Environmental Liability Act (Umwelthaftungsgesetz) enacted January 1, 1991 is claimed to have substantially tightened the environmental liability regime in Germany. The economic consequences of the amendment of the German environmental liability legislation initiated by the Sandoz accident...

In providing precautionary incentives and allocating environmental risk, liability for environmental damages faces two difficulties: randomness of damages incurred and nonobservability of precautionary measures. Hence, a major obstacle in enforcing legal claims is the difficulty of proving...

We present a new partial equilibrium theory of price adjustment, based on consumer loss aversion. In line with prospect theory, the consumers' perceived utility losses from price increases are weighted more heavily than the perceived utility gains from price decreases of equal magnitude. Price...

Some path-breaking work on mergers takes efficiency gains for granted, or assumes that firms have perfect knowledge when taking merger decisions. In practice, firms and competition authorities cannot know exact future efficiency gains, prior to merger consummation. This paper analyzes horizontal...

Smallholders often have to certify according to international standards and produce under contract for large agro-businesses to access the export market. While mostly positive effects for the farmers have been found for contracts and certifications, little is known about the role of individual...

This paper addresses the reduction of market failure under imperfect competition. It proposes a taxscheme that provides firms with an incentive to forgo their market power: Firms optimize after-tax profits. Now simply consider a firm´s gross profit margin the unique tax-rate it is charged on...