Hydropower optimization includes market prices, the plant-specific technological constraints and the environmental operation constraints set by the regulator. An efficient environmental flow regulation should consider both the improved ecological state of the river system (benefit) and the loss...

On February 2011, the European Commission adopted a new strategy to improve measures and access to raw materials, considering that EU is high dependence of imports of them. The new strategy considers three pillars to improving raw materials access. One of them is boosting resource efficiency and...

The aim of this study is to link variation in energy cost misperceptions to variation in households' energy consumption. The focus is on two sorts of misperceptions: First, present biased discounting of future energy costs and second, biased energy price beliefs. By running an artefactual field...

Effective attention to information may play a prominent role in consumer choice for energy-intensive services and it may simply be a function of receiving timely information when consumption takes place. This paper investigates whether and why the timing of utility bills leads to salience bias...

This paper shows that firms respond strategically to ENERGY STAR, a voluntary certification program for energy-efficient products. Firms offer products that bunch at the certification requirement, differentiate certified products in energy and non-energy dimensions, and charge a price premium on...

Industrial activity periodically experiences breakthrough innovations in energy efficiency, but the estimated impacts of these innovations on aggregate energy use are highly varied. We develop a general equilibrium model to investigate whether this variation is determined by the structure of the...

There is widespread concern that climate policy is moving too slowly and that decarbonization of economic development is coming too late for effective climate protection. We analyze three different effects that emerge endogenously during decarbonization and amplify current policies: growing...

Energy efficiency regulation is an important driver for innovations in environmental technologies. Improvements of energy efficiency do not only contribute to reach envi-ronmental policy targets, they can be furthermore economically profitable. E.g. private households can reduce their costs in...

Tradable White Certificates (TWC) schemes, also labelled Energy-Efficiency Certificates schemes, were recently implemented in Great Britain, Italy and France. Energy suppliers have to fund a given quantity of energy efficiency measures, or to buy so-called "white certificates" from other...