Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...

In 2005, an EU-wide emissions trading scheme covering major CO2 producing sites shall come into power. The key objective of the trading scheme is to promote cost-efficiency of carbon reduction within the EU. We identify policy-relevant tradeoffs between overall efficiency, compensation and...

This paper analyses the effects of a social assistance reform in Germany. In contrast to studies which are based on microsimulation methods we use a computable general equilibrium model which incorporates a discrete choice model of labour supply to simulate a variety of reform scenarios. The...

Starting in 2005, the EU will implement a CO2 emissions trading scheme. In this paper we show that the outspoken goals of economic efficiency and free allocation of allowances are incompatible with harmonized allocation rules. In general, the assignment of allowances is endogenous and differs...

We present a model that integrates the discrete working time choice of heterogenous households into a general equilibrium setting where wages are determined by sectoral bargaining between firms and trade unions. The model is calibrated to German micro and macro data. We then use it to analyse...

This paper advocates computable general equilibrium models as a methodological tool that is particularly suitable for measuring the impacts of policy interference on the three dimensions of sustainable development, i.e. environmental quality, economic performance (gross efficiency) and equity....

We investigate the importance of ?what?-flexibility on top of ?where?- and ?when?-flexibility for alternative emission control schemes that prescribe long-term temperature targets and eventually impose additional constraints on the rate of temperature change. We find that ?what?-flexibility...

This paper studies energy bias in technical change. For this purpose, we develop a computable general equilibrium model that builds on endogenous growth models. The model explicitly captures links between energy, the rate and direction of technical change, and the economy. We derive the...

The objective of our analysis is to find out whether an increase in working time without pay compensation can be considered an adequate policy to reduce unemployment. From the perspective of economic theory the outcome is in general ambiguous: On the one hand, as the increase in working time...

We motivate the formulation of market equilibria as a mixed complementarity problem (MCP) in order to bridge the gap between bottom-up energy system models and top-down general equilibrium models for energy policy analysis. Our objective is primarily pedagogic. We first lay out that the MCP...