The discussion of the support for renewable energy must consider the distributional impact of cost allocation. The public is sensitive to social imbalances caused by rising power prices that might jeopardize the acceptance of energy transformation. By the end of 2012 about 19 percent of German...

Following a Federal Constitutional Court sentence, wealth tax has not been levied in Germany since 1997. A possible revival has since regularly been the subject of political debate. Several German federal states are currently preparing to submit a bill to the Bundesrat. A basic scenario...

2013 will see a significant increase in the surcharge stipulated by the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) and paid by power consumers to promote the use of renewable energies. This will equate to a rise in the share of private households' consumer spending on electricity from around 2.3 percent...

The life-cycle hypothesis implies that consumption would not decline at retirement. However, several studies found relevant declines in food consumption after retirement for the United States. Others concluded that this contradiction of the life-cycle hypothesis is solved by allowing for broader...

We calculate the expected incidence of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS) using industry and household-level data. By combining data on direct CO2 emissions by production sector from the German Environmental Account with the German Input-Output Accounts, we calculate the CO2...

This paper empirically investigates the relevance of liquidity constraints and excess sensitivity in intertemporal household consumption. Using a pseudo panel that has been constructed on rich German consumption survey data, we estimate the consumption responses to permanent and transitory...

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

The life-cycle hypothesis implies that consumption would not decline at retirement. However, several studies found relevant declines in food consumption after retirement for the United States. Others concluded that this contradiction of the life-cycle hypothesis is solved by allowing for broader...