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...

We combine two extensions of the differentiated duopoly model of Dixit (1979), namely Caminal and Vives (1996) and Brander and Spencer (2015a,b), to analyze the effect of consumer learning on firms' incentives to differentiate their products in models of Cournot and Bertrand competition....

Hotellings berühmtes "Prinzip der minimalen Differenzierung" behauptet, dass zwei Firmen, die sich miteinander in räumlichem Wettbewerb befinden, dieselbe Position wählen. Wenn man räumlichen Wettbewerb als Modellierung von Produktdifferenzierung versteht, bedeutet dieses, dass die Firmen...

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...

Many countries have introduced Energy Performance Certificates to mitigate the information asymmetry with respect to the thermal quality of houses. Drawing on a stylized theoretical model that is coupled with comprehensive data on real estate advertisements in the German housing market, this...

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...