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...

This paper evaluates an intervention that randomized information letters about energy efficient investments and behaviors among 120,000 customers of two utilities in Germany. We find that conservation effects differ considerably between both utilities, ranging from a precisely estimated zero...

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...

Extending the power grid into hitherto unconnected areas is high on the policy agenda in Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, connection rates and electricity consumption remain low in grid connected areas, at least in the short and medium run. This paper provides a long-term follow-up on an evaluation of a...

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...

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...

Energy-efficient biomass cookstoves (EEBC) are an important technology for the three billion people relying on firewood and charcoal for cooking in the Global South. This paper assesses the price-responsiveness of demand for EEBC and the role of information about health and economic benefits....

The EU-wide Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), established in 2005, is a key pillar of Europe¿s strategy to attain compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Under this scheme, CO2 allowances have thus far been allocated largely free of charge. This paper demonstrates that such cost-free allocation,...

Focusing on individual motorists in car-owning households in Germany, this paper econometrically investigates the determinants of automobile travel with the specific aim of quantifying the effects of fuel prices and person-level attributes on travel conducted over a five-day week and weekend....

The security of energy supply has again become a similarly hot topic as it was during the oil crises in the 1970s, not least due to the recent historical oil price peaks. In this paper, we analyze the energy security situation of the G7 countries using a statistical risk indicator and empirical...