Finland introduced the planet’s first carbon tax in 1990 to experiment with, to most economists, the best policy to reverse carbon emissions. I estimate the causal effect of taxing carbon on Finnish emissions using the Synthetic Control Approach (Abadie, 2021). The results suggest that taxing...

This paper investigates the impacts of the Swiss CO2 levy on households' heating demand. Using a difference-in-differences approach combined with inverse probability of treatment weighting, we test whether the 2016 carbon tax rate increase had a short-term impact on Swiss households' heating...

Strategic environmental policy games are usually based on simultaneous decision making and reach the conclusion that the policy choices are strategic substitutes. Empirical evidence, however, shows that the introduction of a regulatory instrument usually follows a consecutive pattern that is...

Mit der Einführung des europäischen Emissionshandelssystems kommt es zwangs-läufig zu einer Überschneidung der Regelungsbereiche mit der in Deutschland be-reits existierenden Ökosteuer. In diesem Artikel wird diskutiert, inwieweit durch die direkte und indirekte Interaktion beider...

Energy markets and energy-intensive industries in all EU member states – especially in Germany – are subject to a diverse set of policies related to climate change. We analyse the potential efficiency losses from simultaneous application of emission taxes and emissions trading in qualitative...

Economic theory suggests that with a pollution externality and learning spillovers related to renewable energy technologies, the optimal climate policy mix includes an emissions policy and an output subsidy to the learning industry. Instead of output subsidies, feed-in tariffs are often...

The combination of emissions trading and emissions taxes is usually rejected as redundant or inefficient. This conclusion is based on the restrictive assumption that both policies are exclusively meant to control pollution. However, particularly taxes may pursue a variety of other policy...

Countries with an active climate policy often use several other policy instruments in addition to a price on carbon emissions, such as subsidies to renewable energy. An obvious reason for subsidizing alternatives to carbon energy is that the price of carbon emissions is too low. The paper...

Am 1. April 1999 trat die erste Stufe der ökologischen Steuerreform in Kraft. Für die kurz zuvor ins Amt gekommene rot-grüne Bundesregierung war dieses Reformprojekt von großer programmatischer Bedeutung und politischer Brisanz. Die Grundidee: Umweltpolitische Lenkungsimpulse sollten mit...

Die Bundesregierung hat sich ambitionierte Klimaziele gesetzt: Die Treibhausgasemissionen sollen bis zum Jahr 2020 um 40%, bis zum Jahr 2030 sogar um 55% sinken. Zum Erreichen dieser Klimaziele sprechen sich die meisten Ökonomen für eine Ausweitung des europäischen Emissionshandels auch auf...