The aim of this work is to evaluate the impact of domestic and global biofuel policies on Germany's agricultural sector. The central part of our study is divided into four sections. Section 2 presents in detail the issues that make biofuels a debated topic in today's economic policies....

This paper assesses the validity of the perception-based governance indicators used by the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) for aid allocation decisions. By conducting Explanatory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of data from 1996 to 2009, we find that although the MCA purports to measure...

In this paper a mixed-frequency VAR à la Mariano & Murasawa (2004) with Markov regime switching in the parameters is estimated by Bayesian inference. Unlike earlier studies, that used the pseuo-EM algorithm of Dempster, Laird & Rubin (1977) to estimate the model, this paper describes how to...

Structural VAR models require two ingredients: (i) Informational sufficiency, and (ii) a valid identification strategy. These conditions are unlikely to be met by small-scale recursively identified VAR models. I propose a Bayesian Proxy Factor-Augmented VAR (BP-FAVAR) to combine a large...

Studies analyzing renewable energy market development usually investigate additional capacity or investment. Characteristics, roles and determinants of cross border trade with renewable energy system components remain blurred. Environmental regulation and renewable energy policies are important...

Better understanding the innovative process of renewable energy technologies is important for tackling climate change. Though concentrating solar power is receiving growing interest, innovation studies so far have explored innovative activity in solar technologies in general, ignoring the major...

This paper studies technological change in renewable energies, providing empirical evidence on the determinants of innovative activity with a special emphasis on the role of knowledge spillovers. We investigate two major renewable energy technologies - wind and solar - across a panel of 21 OECD...

Chinese companies have become major technology producers, with the largest share of their output exported. This paper examines the development of solar PV and wind energy technology component (WETC) exports from China and the competitive position of the country`s renewable energy industry. We...

Mexico plans to implement a national program to support the adoption of distributed photo-voltaic generation (DPVG) among qualified households. The main objectives of such a program would be to reduce the burden of the substantial federal energy subsidy and increase the share of renewable energy...