Large but temporary price increases are sometimes deployed on days when the demand for electricity is extremely high due to exceptionally warm or cold weather. But what happens when the extreme price changes are permanent? Between January 2013 and April 2016, natural gas and electricity prices...

We provide the first estimate of the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption, η, for a post-transition economy in the Central & Eastern European region, the Czech Republic, based on individual-level data. The parameter η is a crucial component of the social discount rate (SDR), which...

We estimate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for conserving crop varieties for ten years in the Czech Republic using a double-bounded dichotomous choice model to analyze data collected with an online contingent valuation survey administered to a main country-wide sample of 1037 respondents and a...

How are different consumption activities structured within the Czech society, and what effects do they have on the environment? This new volume by Milan Scasny, Jan Urban and Iva Zverinova proposes examples of policy measures and tools aimed at reducing the adverse environmental effects of...

This paper studies environmental taxation in a Mirrlees setting when energy, a polluting good, is used both as a factor of production and a final consumption good. The model is calibrated for the Czech economy. We study two different tax systems. Both consider a non-linear income tax but the...

Untapped improvements in energy efficiency in the residential sector may deliver large savings in energy use and the CO2 associated emissions. Yet empirical assessments have been difficult and controversial. We collect monthly natural gas meter readings from a sample of homes in Transcarpathia,...

Consumers often struggle to grasp complicated pricing plans, including increasing block rate (IBR) schemes, which have been used for decades by utilities in many parts of the world. The assumption that they encourage conservation has, however, recently been challenged (Ito, 2014). We take...