The Climate action and renewable energy package proposed by the European Commission in the beginning of 2008 suggests auctioning as basic principle for allocation for the upcoming third trading phase of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme that runs from 2013 to 2020. Overall, it is estimated that at...

This paper deals with designing emissions trading in practice. After a short introduction to the general idea of emissions trading, practical requirements for the introduction of an emissions trading scheme are considered, including the temporal and spatial dimension as well as administrative...

Current climate and energy policy has to operate under an ex-ante unforeseen economic crisis. An obvious consequence is the collapse of prices for carbon emission allowances as, for example, seen in the European Union. However, this price collapse may be amplified by the interaction of a carbon...

We develop an agent-based model in which heterogenous and boundedly rational agents interact by trading a risky asset at an endogenously set price. Agents are endowed with balance sheets comprising the risky asset as well as cash on the asset side and equity capital as well as debt on the...

We develop an agent-based model in which heterogeneous and boundedly rational agents interact by trading a risky asset at an endogenously set price. Agents are endowed with balance sheets comprising the risky asset as well as cash on the asset side and equity capital as well as debt on the...

This paper provides novel evidence on exchange rate expectations of both chartists and fundamentalists separately. These groups indeed form expectations differently. Chartists change their expectations more often; however, all professionals' expectations vary considerably as they generally...

The communication policy of the European Central Bank attracts a lot of attention from financial markets. This paper analyses the informational content of the monthly introductory statements of the ECB president explaining interest rate decisions with regard to inflation expectations of...

This paper examines German business survey data to uncover the influence of political news on expectations concerning the starting date of the European Monetary Union (EMU). In this survey the participants were asked to indicate whether they expect a punctual or a delayed start of the EMU....

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...

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...