Although natural hazard insurance is advocated as an important means of risk management, private insurance demand often remains below critical levels. Prior loss experience and the design of governmental relief schemes are two factors potentially influencing insurance decisions. We address these...

Flood insurance helps to cope with the risk of flooding, but take-up rates are relatively low. Insurance density could rise if index-based insurance (IBI) were provided as an alternative to traditional damage-based insurance (DBI). We analyze whether there is potential for private demand for IBI...

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...

This paper analyses the determinants of employment reactions of firms when environmental innovations have been carried out. It differentiates hereby between employment increases and decreases. The data stem from a telephone survey covering more than 1500 firms in five European countries that...

Today, more than 70% of the world?s total electricity production is supplied by power plants using conventional fossil fuels. Coal accounts for more than half of the fossil fuel combustion in electricity plants. Future mega trends give reason to believe that electricity demand will double until...

In this paper we model the adjustment process of European Union Allowance (EUA) prices to the releases of announcements at high-frequency controlling for intraday periodicity, volatility clustering and volatility persistence. We find that the high-frequency EUA price dynamics are very well...

A diverse set of tools has been developed in Industrial Ecology to tackle the problems caused by human economic activity. These instruments include Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Material Flow Analysis (MFA). Especially LCA is now increasingly used in policy making. Design and Evaluation of...

The iron and steel industry is one of the most carbon emitting and energy consuming sectors in Europe. At the same time this sector is of high economic importance for the European Union. Therefore, while public environmental and energy policies target this sector, there is political concern that...

In this paper we examine the nonlinear relation between the EUA price and its fundamentals, such as energy prices, macroeconomic risk factors and weather conditions. By estimating a Markov regime-switching model, we find that the relation between the EUA price and its fundamentals varies over...

We estimate the impact of a feed-in tariff for renewable power on wind power investment in Germany at the county level from 1996-2010 controlling for windiness and access to the electricity transmission grid. After the Renewable Energy Law (EEG) was passed in 2000, the feed-in tariff became...