The pricing of public transportation is a frequently debated subject, and a notable current trend is leaning towards flat-rate pricing. In the previous year, Germany introduced a flat-rate ticket, enabling individuals to access public transportation across the entire country for just 9 euros per...

We derive optimal subsidization of renewable energies in electricity markets. The analysis takes into account that capacity investment must be chosen under uncertainty about demand conditions and capacity availability, and that capacity as well as electricity generation may be sources of...

Based on the seminal paper of Farrell (1957), researchers have developed several methods for measuring efficiency. Nowadays, the most prominent representatives are nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) and parametric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), both introduced in the late 1970s....

The overestimation of willingness-to-pay (WTP) in hypothetical responses is a wellknown finding in the literature. Various techniques have been proposed to remove or, at least, reduce this bias. Using responses from a panel of about 6,500 German households on their WTP for a variety of power...

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...

Using detailed data originating from several hundred households of the German Residential Energy Survey (GRECS), this paper empirically investigates the returns on investment in home-equipped photovoltaics (PV) installations. We find that these returns were particularly high in the years 2009 to...

In the aftermath of natural disasters, governments frequently provide financial aid for affected households. This policy can have adverse effects if individuals anticipate it and forgo private precaution measures. While theoretical literature unequivocally suggests this so called “charity...

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 seminal studies by Allcott and Mullainathan (2010), Allcott (2011), and Allcott and Rogers (2014) suggest that social comparison-based home energy reports (HER) are a cost-effective non-price intervention to stimulate energy conservation. The present paper demonstrates the context-dependency...

Stochastic frontier analysis is a popular tool to assess firm performance. Almost universally it has been applied using maximum likelihood estimation. An alternative approach, pseudolikelihood estimation, decouples estimation of the error component structure and the production frontier, has been...