We explore the long and short run relationship between private consumption, disposable income and housing and financial wealth approximated by price indices for a panel of industrialized countries. Consumption, income and wealth are cointegrated in their common, but not in their idiosyncratic...

Increasing utilization of renewable energy sources (RES) is a priority worldwide. Germany has been a forerunner in the deployment of RES and has ambitious goals for the future. The support and use of renewables affects the economy: It creates business opportunities in sectors producing renewable...

In the last two decades, feed-in tariffs (FIT) and renewable portfolio standards (RPS) have emerged as two of the most popular policies for supporting renewable electricity (RES-E) generation in the developed world. A few studies have assessed their effectiveness, but most do not account for...

Renewable portfolio standards (RPS) are the most popular U.S. state-level policies for promoting deployment of renewable electricity (RES-E). While several econometric studies have estimated the effect of RPS on in-state RES-E deployment, results are contradictory. We reconcile these studies and...

Eine erste systematische, modellgestützte Untersuchung der ökologischen Steuerreform in Deutschland kommt zu moderaten bis positiven Effekten auf Wirtschaftswachstum, Beschäftigung, Energieverbrauch und CO2-Emissionen. Für die Analyse wurden zwei gesamtwirtschaftliche Modelle - ein...

This paper focuses on decentralized energy in Germany and how households' environmental behavior in terms of energy consumption is shaped in these contexts. It sets out to gain a more precise understanding of whether decentralized energy initiatives are a good tool to promote the adoption of...

We analyze the importance of global shocks for the global economy and national policy makers. More specifically, we investigate whether monetary policy has become less effective in the wake of financial globalization. We also examine whether there is increasing uncertainty for central banks due...

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which...

The integration of China into the global economy is one of the most spectacular events in economic history. This paper investigates to what extent this process affects output growth and inflation in the advanced countries. A GVAR model is specified to explore interdependencies between business...

We estimate the effect of government spending shocks on the US economy with a time-varying parameter vector autoregression. The recent Great Recession period appears to be characterized by uniquely large impulse responses of output to fiscal shocks. Moreover, the particularity of this period is...