The theory of international environmental agreements overwhelmingly assumes that governments engage as unitary agents. Each government makes choices based on benefits and costs that are simple national aggregates, and similarly on a single set of national-level motivations, together drawing a...

Megacities already account for a major part of global energy-related CO2 emissions with a strong tendency to increase; hence, future climate policy has to put a special emphasis on reducing big cities' energy consumption, especially in a world, where global climate negotiations are deadlocked....

This paper studies the voluntary provision of public goods that is partially driven by a desire to offset for individual polluting activities. We first extend existing theory and show that offsets allow a reduction in effective environmental pollution levels while not necessarily extending the...

In den USA, weltweit zweitgrößte Wirtschaftsmacht und gleichzeitig zweitgrößter Emittent von Treibhausgasen, war die Regierungsübernahme durch die Obama-Administration im Jahr 2008 geprägt von großen Hoffnungen nach der klimapolitischen Abstinenz der Bush-Regierung (Moslener/Sturm 2008,...

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...

Research suggests that a donor country's decision to provide post-disaster assistance is not only driven by the severity of a disaster and the resulting humanitarian needs in the recipient country but also by strategic considerations. We argue that the identification of the determinants of the...

It is popular belief that the weather is bad more frequently on weekends than on other days of the week and this is often perceived to be associated with an increased chance of rain. In fact, the meteorological literature does report some evidence for such human-induced weekly cycles although...

This paper is about the effect of climate change on Sub-Sahara African (SSA) agricultural production in a post-colonial setting. While agricultural production certainly is the result of a multi-dimensional process (influenced by diverse branches of politics, by technology, and also by trade...

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...

The objective of this paper is to assess the likely allocation effects of the current climate protection strategy as it is laid out in the National Allocation Plans (NAPs) for the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The multi-regional, multi-sectoral CGEmodel DART is used to simulate the...