This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

As raw and processed materials constitute a major share of the cost of inputs to industrial production in all developed countries and since the raw material crisis in 2009 revealed the criticality of the raw material supply worldwide, the increasingly efficient use of material resources has...