The causality between energy consumption and real income in developed countries has been a very vital research topic in recent years. Raising concerns about climate change and global warming increase the pressure on policy makers to take action against energy depletion. Unfortunately these...

The use of renewable energy (RE) sources plays a significant role in increasing the security of energy supply and mitigating climate change. Whereas this role is undisputed, there is an ongoing discussion about the employment impacts of promoting RE deployment. In the past years several studies...

Imputed rental income of homeowners is tax exempt in most countries, despite the long-standing arguments recommending its inclusion in the tax base, on both equity and efficiency grounds. While the financial and fiscal crisis revived interest towards this form of taxation, this paper...

Ageing societies influence the development of industrialised countries. A changing age composition of the population not only affects pension and social security systems but also infrastructure, housing market, available workforce and consumption pattern. Though the process proceeds only slowly,...

The standard vector error correction (VEC) model assumes the iid normal distribution of disturbance term in the model. This paper extends this assumption to include GARCH process. We call this model as VEC-GARCH model. However as the number of parameters in a VEC-GARCH model is large, the...

The overall degree of international equity market connectedness has gradually increased over the past two decades. Reflecting the shift in global economic power, it has been recently suggested to pay more attention to the BRICT (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Turkey) countries. Building on,...

In a Bayesian setting, investments can be risky either because they are opaque, i.e., their payoff-relevant signals are noisy, or because they are fundamentally risky, i.e., the variance of the prior is high. When interest rates are low (high), investors favor opaque (transparent) projects that...

COP17 in Durban revealed once again the general willingness to commit to the 2°-target and the difficulty to reach an international Post-Kyoto agreement until 2015. There is strong evidence from model-based analysis that economic costs of reaching the 2°-target will be below global GDP growth...

The German Energiekonzept (Energy Concept) was proposed in 2010 with the goal of making the country one of the world’s most energy efficient and environmentally friendly economies (Bundesregierung, 2011). One year later, as a reaction to the multiple reactor meltdowns in Fukushima, this...

Analyzing the dynamics of structural change of an industry is a fundamental but challenging issue in economics. Accordingly, many attempts have been made to rationalize entry and exit decisions of firms, which, in total, appear as structural change of a sector. Among the most often hypothesized...