The economic costs of chronic health conditions and severe illnesses like diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer are immense. Several clinical trials give information about the importance of individual behaviour for the prevalence of these illnesses. Changes in health relevant behaviour may...

This paper uses panel data on life satisfaction of about 40,000 individuals in Germany from 1994 to 2013 to analyze the relationship of subjective well-being and several measures of fuel poverty. We study fuel poverty and its effects on life satisfaction in terms of incidence, intensity and in...

The analysis uses seven waves from the German Panel Study Labor Market and Social Security (PASS) covering the period from 2006 to 2013. During the observation period, Germany experienced a significant increase in average real incomes and employment, accompanied by a decrease of absolute income...

Solar thermal roof-top installations offer the potential to meet an important share of residential water and space heating demand in Germany. These systems are subsidised with grants under the so-called market incentive program. The political goal is to encourage the adoption of renewable energy...

The Euro area faces zero inflation paired with low economic growth, at a time when the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates and large budget deficits are constraining conventional monetary and fiscal policy. In this article, we discuss the theoretical and empirical evidence on...

Drawing on the most recent wave of the German Residential Energy Survey (GRECS), this paper estimates the contribution of individual appliances to household electricity consumption. Moving beyond the standard focus of estimating mean effects, we combine the conditional demand approach with...

This volume was prepared by Julian Dieler while he was working with the Center for Energy, Climate and exhaustible Resources at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research. At the latest since the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 climate policies are permanently on the international policy...

This paper studies the short-term impact of public smoking bans on hospitalizations in Germany. It exploits the staggered implementation of smoking bans over time and across the 16 federal states along with the universe of hospitalizations from 2000-2008 and daily county-level weather and...

Empirical evidence on households' awareness of electricity prices and potentially divergent demand responses to price changes conditional on price knowledge is scant. Using panel data originating from Germany’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey (GRECS), we fill this void by employing an...