In Germany, hard coal has been subsidized for almost half a century. Despite the declining significance of hard coal production for the domestic labor market, the magnitude of subsidies increased until the middle of the last decade. In 1996, they peaked at € 6.7 bill.While German hard coal...

Any researcher would certainly agree with Hamermesh’s (1993:34) intuition about separability that the ease of substitution between any two production factors should be unaffected by a third factor that is separable from the others. This paper emphasizes that such a notion of separability needs...

As part of its efforts to reach the targets of the Kyoto Protocol, the European Commission published in December 2008 a resolution on a new directive to reduce the per-kilometer CO2 emissions of newly registered automobiles. This paper critically assesses this resolution with respect to its...

Along with the oil price, concerns about the security of energy supply have soared once again in recent years. Yet, some 40 years after the OPEC oil embargo in 1973, there is no widely accepted statistical measure that captures the notion of energy security. Most likely, this deficit is the...

Die Bundesregierung hat sich im Koalitionsvertrag auf eine Verlängerung der Laufzeiten deutscher Atomkraftwerke festgelegt. Dort wurde ebenfalls angekündigt, dass ein Teil der bei den Betreibern entstehenden Zusatzgewinne über einen Vorteilsausgleich abgeschöpft werden soll. Beide...

In den vergangenen Jahren erlebte Deutschland einen Solarboom. Stark fallende Preise für Solarmodule sowie die hohen Einspeisevergütungen führten dazu, dass die Photovoltaik (PV) massiv ausgebaut wurde. Dies ist entgegen erster Intuition keine gute, sondern eine gefährliche Entwicklung.

This note attempts to reconcile a range of primary methods for dealing with price asymmetry, such as the approaches proposed by Tweeten and Quance (1969), Wolffram (1971) and Houk(1977). Using Wolffram’s stylized example, we first illustrate that the notion of asymmetry can be captured in a...