This paper explores transnational environmental agreements on climate change. As the Paris agreement of 2015 contains no binding emission reduction targets for nation states, understanding other forms of cooperation as complements to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change...

Policy advocates frequently request for unilateral action to push forward climate protection in international negotiations. It is yet conventional wisdom in environmental economics that unilateral action does not pay for the first mover due to free-riding behavior of the other countries. How...

We investigate whether global cooperation for emission abatement can be improved if asymmetric countries can sign different parallel environmental agreements. The analysis assumes a two-stage game theoretical model. Conditions for self-enforcing sets of agreements and the resulting total...

Strongly correlated and spatially concentrated curtailment of power plants strongly affects the electricity market. Such curtailment is observed during heat waves in middle Europe, for example. First, curtailed power plants need to be substituted by more expensive ones. Second, additional...

What can institutional economics offer to analyze and shape the transformation of electricity systems towards a low-carbon future? This volume presents papers from a postgraduate research course in "Sustainability Economics and Management" in the winter term 2014/15. The introductory chapter...

We extend the theory of peak-load pricing by considering that the production with different technologies can be adjusted within their capacity at different speeds. In the established analysis, all production decisions can be made after the random variables realize. In our setting, in contrast,...

Climate policies can target either the demand or the supply of fossil fuels. While demandside policies have been analyzed in the literature and applied in policy-making, supply-side policies, e.g. deposit policies, are a promising option and a recent research focus. In this paper we study...

Does climate change adaptation require that investments are designed to be more robust? What about when climate change is more uncertain? What if the climate changes faster? This decision problem is difficult if the design of the investments is irreversible for their lifetime, for instance, in...

The negotiations for a global climate agreement recognize that substantial and additional funds need to be generated for assisting adaptation in developing countries. Currently, the 2% adaptation levy (AL) on the clean development mechanism (CDM) is intended to serve this purpose under the Kyoto...