We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method allowing us to disentangle the policy effect from changing market incomes. Over the period 1979-2007, the cumulative policy effect aggravated inequality by increasing the income share of the top...

Political feasibility of emission trading systems may crucially depend on the free initial allocation of emission allowances to energy-intensive industries in order to ameliorate adverse production and employment effects. We investigate the potential trade-off between such compensation and...

Over the last decade Germany has boosted renewable energy in power production by means of massive subsidies. The flip side are very high electricity prices which raises concerns that the transition cost towards a renewable energy system will be mainly borne by poor households. In this paper, we...

The paper addresses the welfare implications of conditional grants if government failure leads to inefficiencies in the production of regional public goods and services. Conditional grants may improve welfare by setting incentives for regions to improve efficiency. At the same time, resources...

This paper proposes that the national focus of energy ‘rebound’ studies should be extended to an international context in the presence of supra-national agreements such as EU 20-20-20. The potential for energy efficiency improvements in one nation to impact energy use in others means that...

Fibre-deployment of next-generation communications networks is currently a major challenge for investing firms as well as for national regulators and is also subject to hot debates at EU level. This work examines the role of regulatory policies and competition controlling for relevant supply and...

This paper provides evidence on the migration from an “old” technology to a “new” technology, taking into account the impact that regulatory interventions on the old one might have on the incentives to invest and adopt the new one. This analysis has been applied to a sample of EU27...