In the absence of a broad international agreement, national climate policies are less efficient, due to carbon leakage, and more costly, due to causing unemployment and a loss of competitiveness on international markets. As, in many countries, a substantial fraction of emissions results from the...

Mit 01. Januar 2008 wurde in der Schweiz ein System zum Handel von Emissionsrechten gestartet. Neben der CO2-Abgabe und dem Klimarappen auf Treibstoffe soll diese klimapolitische Massnahme wesentlich zur Erfüllung der Kyoto-Zielreduktion beitragen. Die Schweiz verfolgt zur Senkung der...

Environmental policy often has to be devised under informational constraints, like uncertainty and asymmetric information. We consider an environmental policy that aims at reducing the welfare losses caused by asymmetric information while being sufficiently simple for implementation. In this...

Ziel dieses Projekts ist die Analyse eines möglichen Zusammenhangs des jüngsten Ölpreisanstiegs mit dem Peak-Oil Effekt, welcher sich über die Verknappung des Erdölangebots realisieren würde. Ein direkter Test einer solchen Interrelation ist jedoch erst ex-post möglich. Dieses Paper...

The transition to a green technology is central to environmental policy. During such a transition, technology and market structure often change simultaneously, as firms developing the new technology enter the market of incumbents supplying the old one. This leads to the questions how...

Green innovation is a key element in fighting climate change. But there are several challenges that need to be addressed in managing a green technology transition, both in terms of interacting market failures (environmental externality, public good nature of innovation, strategic behaviour of...

In many countries, inducing large-scale technological changes has become an important policy objective, as in the context of climate policy or energy transitions. Such large-scale changes require the development of strongly interlinked technologies. But current economic models have little...

We consider an abstract setting of the differential r&d game, where participating firms are allowed for strategic behavior. We assume the information asymmetry across those firms and the government, which seeks to support newer technologies in a socially optimal manner. We develop a general...

We study the optimal adaptation to extreme climate events by the central government in a setup where events are dynamically uncertain and the government does not know the true probabilities of events. We analyze different policy decision rules minimizing expected welfare losses for sites with...