Many developing countries around the world apply progressive water tariffs, often structured in the form of discretely increasing block tariffs (IBTs). These tariffs have been criticized in the welfare economic literature due to their perceived inefficiency: many of the prices charged under IBTs...

We analyze the properties of progressive water tariffs that are often applied in the sector in the form of discretely increasing block tariffs (IBT). We are particularly interested in water tarification in a poverty context where a subsistence level of water has to be allocated to each...

This paper analyzes a modified yardstick competition mechanism (MYC), where the yardstick employed consists of a tariff basket and total costs. This mechanism has a significant information advantage: the regulator "only" needs to observe total costs and output of all firms. The modified...

This note explores the relationship between the price elasticity of demand and the R&D intensity of the product. We introduce the concept of R&D intensity into a standard Dixit-Stiglitz/Krugman-type setting. R&D activity is treated as a fixed cost of production. Within this framework, sectors...

Concerns about global warming and growing scarcity of fossile fuels require substantial changes in energy consumption patterns and energy systems, as targeted by many countries around the world. One key element to achieve such transformation is to increase energy efficiency of the housing stock....

The energy efficiency of the residential housing stock plays a key role in strategies to mitigate climate change and global warming. In this context, it is frequently argued that private investment and the quality of thermal upgrades is too low in the light of the challenges faced and the...

Spatial heterogeneity and spatial dependence are two well established aspects of house price developments. However, the analysis of differences in spatial dependence across time and space has not gained much attention yet. In this paper we jointly analyze these three aspects of spatial data. We...

In this paper, we construct a data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities from 24 countries. The data are collected in January - April 2012 from 33 websites, where the advertisements of flats for sale are placed. Using these data we investigate the determinants of the...

The price for a single-family house depends both on the characteristics of the building and on its location. We propose a novel semiparametric method to extract location values from house prices. After splitting house prices into building and land components, location values are estimated with...

In this paper, we examine the effects of an airport expansion on the prices of houses and flats located under the planned flight corridors. We focus on the role of expectations about the exposure to noise and find that proximity to the planned corridors significantly reduces real estate prices...