Many health care systems aim to enhance hospital quality by encouraging competition. However, evidence on the relationship between quality and competition is inconclusive. My contribution to this literature is two-fold. Analyzing the relationship between competition and quality for the German...

While there is a growing debate among researchers and practitioners on the possible role of central banks and financial regulators in supporting a smooth transition to a low-carbon economy, the information on which macroprudential instruments could be used for reaching the "green structural...

Using longitudinal data from two household surveys in 2017 and 2019, we analyze the determinants of climate skepticism in Germany. We find that nearly 20% of respondents state that they do not believe in climate change and more than 30% are doubtful that climate change is mainly caused by human...

This study investigates the causal effect of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on firms' holdings of fixed assets as an early indicator of industrial relocation, exploiting installation level inclusion criteria of the regulation. To single out companies with particularly low relocation...

Energy labels have been introduced in many countries to increase consumers' attention to energy use in purchase decisions of durables. In a discrete-choice experiment among about 5,000 households, we implement randomized information treatments to explore how energy labels influence purchasing...

The production of electricity on the basis of renewable energy technologies is a classic example of an impure public good. It is often discriminatively financed by industrial and household consumers, such as in Germany, where the energy-intensive sector benefits from a far-reaching exemption...

Based on hypothetical responses originating from a large-scale survey among about 6,000 German households, this study investigates the discrepancy in willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates for green electricity across single-binary-choice and open-ended valuation formats. Recognizing that...

Rental housing where tenants are responsible for their own energy bills but landlords are responsible for energy retrofits may pose a particular challenge in achieving optimal rates of investments in energy efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the severity of this split-incentive problem in...

We propose a fast approximate Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for large data sets embedded in a design based approach. Here, the loglikelihood ratios involved in the Metropolis-Hastings acceptance step are considered as data. The building block is one single subsample from the complete data set,...

We study the time-varying impact of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) on the US Economy by using a VAR with time-varying coefficients. The coefficients are allowed to evolve gradually over time which allows us to discover structural changes without imposing them a priori. We find three different...