The German response to the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident was possibly the most significant change of policy towards nuclear power outside Japan, leading to a sudden and very significant shift in the underlying power generation structure in Germany. This provides a very useful natural...

Ownership unbundling and third party access are discussed as two options of unbundling in both the literature and political discussions. Focusing on the South American electricity sector, I contrast static and dynamic impacts of ownership unbundling and third party access regimes on customer...

We analyze the treatment and impact of idiosyncratic or firm-specific risk in regulation. Regulatory authorities regularly ignore firm-specific characteristics, such as size or asset ages, implying different risk exposure in incentive regulation. In contrast, it is common to apply only a single...

This paper analyses the effects of minimum wages on competition in the German roofing sector. The case is particularly interesting since this sector is faced with a uniform minimum wage despite significant regional disparities in productivity and wages. As a control industry we take the plumbing...

While liberalization in energy markets has been a widely successful process all over the world, incumbents often still hold a dominant position. Thus, electricity wholesale markets are subject to market surveillance. Nevertheless, consolidated findings on abusive practices of market power and...

In German electricity submarkets for residential customers standard contracts offered by former monopolists are the more costly option for customers who have not switched to an alternative contract yet. As most German households are served with this contract type we follow the Limit Pricing...

In der aktuellen Debatte zur Rekommunalisierung von Stromanbietern wird häufig das Argument der sicheren Versorgung zu niedrigen Preisen von Vertretern öffentlicher Eigentümer angeführt. Während die sichere Belieferung mit Strom im Rahmen der Grundversorgung gesetzlich vorgeschrieben ist,...

Due to potential abuse of the market power at wholesale and retail market level for natural gas the Federal Cartel Office in Germany prohibited further forward integration of gas importing firms with retail incumbents from 2005/2006 to 2010. The Authority argued that the very few dominant gas...

We find an asymmetric pass-through of European Emission Allowance (EUA) prices to wholesale electricity prices in Germany and show that this asymmetry has disappeared in response to a report on investigations by the competition authority. The asymmetric pricing pattern, however, was not detected...

The amount of materials used worldwide in production and consumption increased by 56 per cent from 1995 to 2008. Using an index decomposition analysis based on the logarithmic mean divisia index, we investigate the drivers of material use, both on a global and a country scale. We exploit a panel...