As of late 2008, the steady decline of U.S. crude oil production over the last decades was reversed by the increased adoption of the hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") technology. Adapting the supply-side model proposed by Kaufmann et al. (2004) to assess OPEC’s ability to influence real oil...

Drawing on panel data on daily fuel prices covering over 5,000 filling stations in Germany, this paper documents a change in the stations' price setting behavior following the introduction of a legally mandated online price portal in 2013. Prior to the portal, positive asymmetry is found on the...

The increasing use of food commodities for biofuel production has substantial impact on prices and quantities of these and other food commodities. It is therefore likely that this trend also intensifies the competition for arable land. However, evidence for this hypothesis is generated by...

This paper presents evidence that the accumulating cost of Germany’s ambitious plan to transform its system of energy provision – the so-called Energiewende – is butting up against consumers’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) for it. Following a descriptive presentation that traces the German...

Discrete-continuous models have become a common technique for addressing selectivity biases in data sets with endogenously partitioned observational units. Alternative two-stage approaches have been suggested by LEE (1983), DUBIN and MCFADDEN (1984), and DAHL (2002), all of which capture the...

Based on a survey among more than 5,000 German households and a single-binary choice experiment in which we randomly split the respondents into two groups, this paper elicits both households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for power supply security and their willingness to accept (WTA) compensations...

The use of well-designed improved cookstoves (ICS) in regions devoid of modern energy yields high private and social returns, mostly related to considerable woodfuel savings. Take-up rates are nonetheless often very low when people have to pay costcovering prices. This paper presents main...

In many countries, the transition process towards a low-carbon economy has been associated with increasing electricity prices. Microeconometric evaluations of the causal impact of electricity price changes on plant-level outcomes are rare, though. By exploiting local randomization induced by...

In Germany, substantial drops in wholesale power prices have become a regular phenomenon. While such price drops have far-reaching implications for the functioning of the power market, their underlying determinants remain poorly understood. To fill this gap, we propose a Markov regime-switching...