The choice of centralizing tourism policies at the national level or, on the contrary, of decentralizing them at the local level is widely discussed in the literature, which highlights the related pros and cons. In fact, the simultaneous role of originator and attractor of tourism of each...

Qianhai – an innovation park in Shenzhen – has the possibility of boosting innovation in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and in the wider region. This paper analyses the costs and benefits of existing plans for Qianhai and discusses the profit-maximising design of the Qianhai. We review existing...

This paper uses a political economy model to explain the discriminative support for some renewable technologies like photovoltaic. A two party model is used to show how subsidies for technologies that are installed by household voters can incentivise swing voters to vote for a party. It is in...

Most electricity systems face contractual fixed consumer prices in the short term, that is, load and price are fixed before the random supply of renewables like wind or solar realizes. Steam power plants also make production decisions before such a random supply realizes. These capacities cannot...

This dissertation was written by Johannes Pfeiffer while he was working with the ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in November 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the department of economics of the University Regensburg in December 2016. The thesis studies unintended...

We argue that expectations about future energy use affect the transition from fossil fuels to renewable substitutes, because of an interaction between innovation and resource scarcity. The paper presents a model of directed technical change to study this interaction. We find that resource-saving...

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,...

Countries such as Germany and Switzerland have included the energy transition in their policy programs, setting specific targets in terms of energy production from renewables. However, the energy transition has a cost, which so far has been partly covered by subsidizing the clean production....

When the supply of intermittent renewable energies like wind and solar is high, the electricity price is low. Conversely, prices are high when their supply is low. This reduces the pro t potential in renewable energies and, therefore, incentives to invest in renewable capacities. Nevertheless,...

Capacity Remuneration Mechanisms (CRM) can be used in power markets to overtake market failures, reaching security of supply. However, investment in capacity is a dynamic process, that depends on the evolution of prices and costs overtime. In our paper we study the capacity remuneration value...