The differing paradigms of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics have been described in various articles and books and are also embedded in different institutional settings. However, we cannot take for granted that the paradigm debates described in the literature are actually...

This paper studies the politico-economic reasons for the refusal of a proposed compulsory flood insurance scheme in Germany. It provides the rationale for such scheme and outlines the basic features of a market-orientated design. The main reasons for the political down-turn of this proposal were...

The German Environmental Liability Law (ELL) of 1991 has introduced far-reaching civil liability for environmental damages with the aim to increase firms? efforts to prevent accidents. Previous studies find poor evidence that this goal has actually been achieved. One and a half decades after the...

This papers studies the effects on service quality and consumer surplus of a minimum price which is fixed by a bureaucratic non-monopolistic professional association. It shows that the price set by a Niskanen-type professional assocation will maximize consumer surplus only if consumers demand...

This paper discusses the problem of crowding out of insurance by co-existing governmental relief programs - so-called 'charity hazard' - in a context of different institutional schemes of governmental relief in Austria and Germany. We test empirically whether an assured partial relief scheme (as...

This paper provides an overview on the existing systems of natural hazards insurance in Europe, their structural characteristics and peculiarities. It also discusses the difficulties of an adaptation of these systems to climate change and a growing number of natural disasters. Using the case of...

Dieses Papier untersucht die politisch-ökonomischen Gründe für die Ablehnung eines Versicherungspflicht für Elementarschäden in Deutschland. Nach einer Darlegung der ökonomischen Vorteilhaftigkeit und der Grundzüge eines praktikablen Modells einer Elementarschadenversicherungspflicht...

This paper studies the politico-economic reasons for the refusal of a proposed compulsory flood insurance scheme in Germany. It provides the rationale for such scheme and outlines the basic features of a market-orientated design. The main reasons for the political down-turn of this proposal were...

Nach den Versorgungsbereichen Telekommunikation, Strom und Gas steht die Liberalisierung der Wasserwirtschaft auf der politischen Tagesordnung. Welche Besonderheiten sind bei dem Gut Wasser zu berücksichtigen? Welche Wettbewerbsform führt zu den besten Ergebnissen?