Resource and Energy Economics最新文献

Production licenses with use restrictions that limit output are commonly used to regulate biological production processes. Such regulations are vulnerable to rent formation and production distortions that can end up subsidizing harmful environmental behavior. This paper develops a partial equilibrium model for a biological production process and use the model to study the impact of production quotas in Norwegian salmon aquaculture. Results suggest substantial regulatory rents capitalized in license values. Production has intensified leading to excessive stocking of fish per license, a shorting of the production period, and smaller produced fish. Our findings provide important insights for quota policies in food production, especially for cases where quotas are motivated by harmful environmental effects.

To shed light on the recent debate about climate change in this post-pandemic scenario, we take advantage of a unique dataset that combines geo-tagged social media data from Twitter in Spain from 2017 to 2022. Twitter conversations have been analyzed with natural language processing techniques to obtain sentiment scores related to climate change. These were merged with additional relevant control variables, aiming to understand the role of the contributing factors on the evolution of the hedonic scores, including external temperatures, the occurrence of heat waves, and deaths related to climate. We find a strong negative effect of external temperatures on sentiment, aggravated by recent increases in the frequency of heat waves and deaths related to climate. Further, this negative sentiment is accentuated after experiencing the recent COVID-19.

We analyze the political impact of a generous solar panel subsidization program. Subsidies far exceeded their social benefit and were partly financed by new taxes on adopters and by electricity surcharges for all consumers. We use local panel data from Belgium and find a decrease in votes for government parties in municipalities with high adoption rates. This shows that the voters’ punishment for a costly policy exceeded the potential reward by adopters who received generous subsidies. Further analysis indicates that punishment mainly comes from non-adopters, who change their vote towards anti-establishment parties.

While climate policy studies are widespread, fully fledged computable general equilibrium (CGE) model analyses of distributional policy effects are challenging because the required data and approaches are not directly available. To ease such distributional analyses, we provide a step-by-step “recipe” for disaggregating a country-specific representative consumer of a CGE model. Using this “recipe”, we implement German household survey data in a global CGE model by distinguishing three income groups of the German representative consumer. We find that the negative consumption effect of CO${}_2$ pricing is highest for the low-income group, whereas the negative income effect is highest for the high-income group and exceeds the consumption effect. The low-income group benefits most from (per capita-based redistribution of) carbon pricing revenues and receives social transfers such that poor households can be better off with such climate policies than without them. CO${}_2$ pricing of imports at the (EU) border slightly strengthens these distributional effects and is mainly beneficial for the low-income group. The geographic extension of emissions trading within a “climate club” leads to substantial efficiency gains that are beneficial for Germany and the EU.

We employ the footloose capital model to examine and compare how two countries decide on their emission permits non-cooperatively under domestic and international emissions trading in the presence of capital mobility. We find that even if two countries are symmetric and have the same carbon prices under domestic emissions trading, they can benefit from international emissions trading. This finding holds regardless of capital mobility. We also find that allowing footloose capital increases each country’s and global emissions under domestic emissions trading; however, it does not affect emissions under international emissions trading. Additionally, we show that the cooperative choices of emission permits are the same regardless of international mobility of emission permits and capital and are always lower than the non-cooperative ones.

This paper examines a common-pool resource where quotas and fines are set by a regulator, an artisanal organization (cooperative), or both. We analyze the interaction between these two regulatory agencies under a flexible policy regime, where quotas and fines can be revised across periods, and under an inflexible policy regime, where they cannot. We show that inefficiencies arise in the inflexible regime, but they are reduced when the two agencies coexist. Overall, we demonstrate that the artisanal organization may be preferred when environmental damages are low, but the regulator may be preferable otherwise.

Exclusion zones, like protected areas or setback distances, are the most common policy instrument to mitigate environmental impacts of human land-use, including the deployment of renewable energy sources (RES). However, exclusion zones may also increase generation and environmental costs of RES deployment. This paper aims to understand and quantify these trade-offs. Using a simple analytical model, we propose that cost effects of exclusion zones can be decomposed into a substitution effect (because RES generation is shifted to sites with higher or lower marginal costs) and an output effect (because more sites may be needed to attain a given RES generation target). We provide a numerical illustration for two examples of exclusion zones – setback distances to settlements and forest bans – which are implemented for wind power deployment in Germany. We find that moderate setback distances reduce disamenity costs but also lead to increases in generation and other environmental costs. This trade-off is primarily due to the output effect. Importantly, the output effect also implies that very restrictive setback distances may fail to reduce, and even increase, aggregate disamenity costs of wind power deployment. For forest bans, our analysis reveals substantial increases in disamenity costs. This trade-off mainly results from the substitution effect. Our analytical insights can be transferred to other fields of environmental policy, for example, exclusion zones regulating agricultural land-use or urban development.

This paper evaluates residential consumers’ electricity consumption and appliance investment responses to power outages from 2015 to 2019 in Delhi, India. Our empirical strategy takes advantage of features of the electricity distribution network in the service territory of one of Delhi’s regulated distribution utilities that exposes similar customers to plausibly exogenous annual variation in electricity reliability. Using original household survey data and four years of billing and power outage records for more than one million customers, we estimate that an additional hour per month of power outages reduced electricity consumption by 4.8 percent. These estimates suggest that households are willing to pay USD 1.50 per kWh of lost consumption, which is more than 25 times the average price they pay for grid electricity.

This paper reviews forty years of research applying econometric models of discrete-continuous choice to analyze residential demand for energy. The review is primarily from the perspective of economic theory. We examine how well the utility-theoretic models developed in the literature match data that is commonly available on residential energy use, and we highlight the modeling challenges that have arisen through efforts to match theory with data. The literature contains two different formalizations of a corner solution. The first, by Dubin and McFadden (1984) and Hanemann (1984), models an extreme corner solution, in which only one of the discrete choice alternatives is chosen. While those papers share similarities, they also have some differences which have not been noticed or exposited in the literature. Subsequently, a formulation first implemented by Wales and Woodland (1983) and extended by Kim et al. (2002) and Bhat (2008) models a general corner solution, where several but not all of the discrete choice alternatives are chosen. Seventeen papers have employed one or another of these models to analyze residential demand for fuels and/or energy end uses in a variety of countries. We review issues that arose in these applications and identify some alternative model formulations that can be used in future work on residential energy demand.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are likely to emerge as the main means of zero-emission road transport. China has used a variety of policy approaches to encourage EV adoption, including vehicle purchase subsidies. This study uses a three-dimensional dataset to estimate the effect of purchase subsidies for domestic EVs on adoption in 316 cities in China over January 2016–December 2019. An instrumental variable approach that utilizes the timing of the cancellation of local subsidies by the central government is pursued. The findings suggest that purchase subsidies for domestic EVs have led to a sizeable increase in uptake, but have discouraged uptake of imported EVs. Higher consumer awareness of the subsidies is associated with a larger proportional effect on uptake of domestically-produced vehicles. We estimate that increases in the per-vehicle subsidy rate have on average reduced carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions at a marginal subsidy cost of about 4453 CNY (US$712) per tonne, which is high. However other benefits, including long-run benefits from the emergence of a new clean technology sector, may be substantial.