EU Member States increase deployment of intermittent renewable energy sources to deliver the 20% renewable target formulated in the European Renewables Directive of 2008. To incorporate these intermittent sources, a power market needs to be flexible enough to accommodate short-term forecasts and...

The Trump administration has promised to stop the spiraling down of the U.S. coal industry that has been going on for several years. We discuss the origins of the decline of the U.S. coal industry and new policy interventions by the Trump administration. We find that a further decrease of coal...

When possible income tax reforms are debated, the suspected impact on entrepreneurship is often used as an argument in favour or against a certain policy. Quantitative ex-ante evaluations of the effect of certain tax reform options on entrepreneurship based on microeconometric research have not...

This paper uses the newly constructed Luxembourg Wealth Study data to document cross-country variation in homeownership rates and the homeownership-income inequality among young households in Finland, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US, and relate it to cross-country differences in mortgage...

In this paper we develop a dynamic structural life-cycle model of labor supply behavior which fully accounts for the effects of income tax and transfers on labor supply incentives. Additionally, the model recognizes the demand side driven rationing risk that might prevent individuals from...

The ongoing financial crisis so far cost the German financial sector 38 billion Euros due to losses on its mortgage-related subprime bank exposures. This paper looks for the impact of these losses on the real sector of the economy. First, the financial sector is looked at as part of the overall...

In this paper we develop a discrete model of optimal taxation of married couples and empirically discuss the optimality of income taxation for this group. To this end, we derive the social welfare function which guarantees that joint taxation of married couples is optimal. We will contrast this...

Estimates of labour supply effects of recent UK reforms in the area of direct taxes and benefits show that policy can have significant influence on the level of employment. We confirm this in a simulation of in-work support system introduced into the German tax and benefit system. Our simulation...