This volume was prepared by Julian Dieler while he was working with the Center for Energy, Climate and exhaustible Resources at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. At the latest since the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 climate policies are permanently on the international policy...

Recent years have seen a spike in New Zealand's road death toll, a phenomenon also seen in some other countries such as Australia. This paper analyses the short-run impact of fuel prices on road accident outcomes in New Zealand, including the numbers of road deaths, accidents, and injuries....

The Recovery Fund recently proposed by the EU Commission marks a sea-change in European integration. Yet it will not be enough to meet the challenges Europe faces. There has been much public debate about financing, but little about the sort of concrete projects that the EU should be putting...

We assess the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on global fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions over the two-year horizon 2020Q1-2021Q4. We apply a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model, which captures complex spatial-temporal interdependencies across countries associated with the...

The shock to the global economy from COVID-19 is predicted to be faster and more severe than the 2008 global financial crisis and even the Great Depression. We assess its impact on global fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions over a two-year horizon. For this purpose we employ a global...

We measure the impact of frequent exogeneous shocks on small ECCU economies, including changes to global economic activity, tourism flows, oil prices, passport sales, FDI, and natural disasters. Using Canonical-Correlation Analysis (CCA) and dynamic panel regression analysis we find significant...

We consider a new method to estimate causal effects when a treated unit suffers a shock or an intervention, such as a policy change, but there is not a readily available control group or counterfactual. We propose a two-step approach where in the first stage an artificial counterfactual is...

Recently, there has been a growing interest in developing econometric tools to conduct counterfactual analysis with aggregate data when a "treated" unit suffers an intervention, such as a policy change, and there is no obvious control group. Usually, the proposed methods are based on the...

We study estimation and inference in panel data regression models when the regressors of interest are macro shocks, which speaks to a large empirical literature that targets impulse responses via local projections. Our results hold under general dynamics and are uniformly valid over the degree...

Critics protest loudly against restrictions imposed by politicians during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany: Mandatory masks, lockdowns, school and business closures. This paper examines (1) the extent to which these policies have indirectly contributed to limiting the number of COVID-19 cases...