This note attempts to reconcile a range of primary methods for dealing with price asymmetry, such as the approaches proposed by Tweeten and Quance (1969), Wolffram (1971) and Houk(1977). Using Wolffram’s stylized example, we first illustrate that the notion of asymmetry can be captured in a...

The allure of an environmentally benign, abundant, and cost-effective energy source has led an increasing number of industrialized countries to back public financing of renewable energies. Germany's experience with renewable energy promotion is often cited as a model to be replicated elsewhere,...

Identifying the incidence of free-ridership is significant to a range of issues relevant to program evaluation, including the calculation of net program benefits and more general assessments of political acceptability. Estimates of freeridership in the area of energy policy frequently rely on...

We provide evidence that motorists respond to short-run fluctuations in fuel prices at the gas pump and not on the road. Employing variants of censored panel regression to control for unobserved heterogeneity and censoring of the dependent variable, we find that the fuel price has a large and...

As part of its efforts to reach the targets of the Kyoto Protocol, the European Commission is currently considering a new directive to reduce the per-kilometer CO2 emissions of newly registered automobiles. This paper critically assesses this proposal with respect to its economic and...

The EU-wide Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), established in 2005, is a key pillar of Europe’s strategy to attain compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Under this scheme, CO2 allowances have thus far been allocated largely free of charge. This paper demonstrates that such cost-free allocation,...

This article revisits an analysis by Frondel, Ritter and Schmidt (2008) of Germany’s Renewable Energy Act, which legislates a system of feed-in tariff s to promote the use of renewable energies. As in the original article, we argue that Germany’s support scheme subsidizes renewable energy...

Sample selection models, variants of which are the Heckman and Heckit models, are increasingly used by political scientists to accommodate data in which censoring of the dependent variable raises concerns of sample selectivity bias. Beyond demonstrating several pitfalls in the calculation of...

A longstanding question in the study of energy demand concerns the role of information as a determinant of home-efficiency improvements. Although the provision of information via home energy audits is frequently asserted to be an effective means for governments to encourage the implementation of...

Drawing on German household data from 1992 to 2011, this paper analyzes how couples allocate housework against the backdrop of three questions: (1) Does an individual’s contribution to household income - both in absolute and relative terms - influence his or her contribution to housework? (2)...