As of late 2008, the steady decline of U.S. crude oil production over the last decades was reversed by the increased adoption of the hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") technology. Adapting the supply-side model proposed by Kaufmann et al. (2004) to assess OPEC’s ability to influence real oil...

In many countries, the transition process towards a low-carbon economy has been associated with increasing electricity prices. Microeconometric evaluations of the causal impact of electricity price changes on plant-level outcomes are rare, though. By exploiting local randomization induced by...

In Germany, substantial drops in wholesale power prices have become a regular phenomenon. While such price drops have far-reaching implications for the functioning of the power market, their underlying determinants remain poorly understood. To fill this gap, we propose a Markov regime-switching...

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...

Drawing on the 2009 and 2017 waves of the National Household Transportation Survey, this paper models the determinants of vehicle miles traveled, with the aim of parameterizing the magnitude of the fuel price elasticity. To capture changes in this magnitude over the two years of the survey, our...

The EU-wide Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), established in 2005, is a key pillar of Europe¿s strategy to attain compliance with the Kyoto Protocol. Under this scheme, CO2 allowances have thus far been allocated largely free of charge. This paper demonstrates that such cost-free allocation,...

Using household travel diary data collected in Germany between 1997 and 2012, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) approach to estimate fuel price and efficiency elasticities. The aim is to gauge the relative impacts of fuel economy standards and fuel taxes on distance traveled. We find that...

The seminal studies by Allcott and Mullainathan (2010), Allcott (2011), and Allcott and Rogers (2014) suggest that social comparison-based home energy reports (HER) are a cost-effective non-price intervention to stimulate energy conservation. The present paper demonstrates the context-dependency...

What happens to the merit order of electricity markets when all electricity is supplied by intermittent renewable energy sources coupled with large-scale electricity storage? With near-zero marginal cost of production, will there still be a role for an energy-only electricity market? We answer...

This paper reinvestigates the influence of oil price uncertainty on real economic activity in the U.S. using a four-variable VAR, GARCH-in-mean, asymmetric BEKK model. In contrast to previous studies in this area, the analysis focuses on business cycle fluctuations and we control for global...