The investment decision on the placement of wind turbines is, neglecting legal formalities, mainly driven by the aim to maximize the expected annual energy production of single turbines. The result is a concentration of wind farms at locations with high average wind speed. While this strategy...

We address some of the key questions that arise in forecasting the price of crude oil. What do applied forecasters need to know about the choice of sample period and about the tradeoffs between alternative oil price series and model specifications? Are real or nominal oil prices predictable...

Market-based instruments have gradually become a significant tool of environmental policy in central European countries. By using the structural macroeconometric E3ME model the authors compare two alternative green tax based policy frameworks in the Czech Republic. While the first imposes a tax...

This empirical paper is a continuation of our earlier work on time series forecasting of day-ahead electricity prices. Given the controversy in the literature whether to use one large model across all hours or 24 separate models, we study if the model structure (and not only the coefficients)...

We investigate the forecasting power of different time series models for electricity spot prices. The models include different specifications of linear autoregressive time series with heteroscedastic noise and/or additional fundamental variables and non-linear regime-switching TAR-type models....

"The labour-market policy-mix in Germany is increasingly being decided on a regional level. This requires additional knowledge about the regional development which (disaggregated) national forecasts cannot provide. Therefore, we separately forecast employment for the 176 German labour- market...

"We forecast unemployment for the 176 German labour-market districts on a monthly basis. Because of their small size, strong spatial interdependencies exist between these regional units. To account for these as well as for the heterogeneity in the regional development over time, we apply...