Resource and Energy Economics最新文献

Natural resources such as fish, and wildlife have the ability to move across different areas within an ecosystem. Such movements are subject to random changes in environmental conditions (e.g., nutrients, temperature, oxygen). Although empirical evidence suggests that learning about such movements helps improve management, the related economic literature concentrates on scenarios in which the resource population lives in a closed area and cannot migrate. In this paper, we develop a spatial bioeconomic model to examine a renewable resource harvester’s responses to learning about fish movements. Our baseline is the scenario in which the harvester is fully informed about the distribution of fish movements. We find that introducing uncertainty and learning about fish movements critically affects extraction incentives. For instance, we show that uncertainty and learning may increase harvest in a patch and reduce harvest in another patch when the marginal harvesting cost function is constant. In the stock dependent marginal harvesting cost case, we delineate conditions under which uncertainty and learning increase harvest in all patches. We also show how harvest responses to learning change with the distribution of uncertainty.

Previous laboratory evidence suggests that people tend to value their decision right beyond its instrumental value. We measure the intrinsic value of decision rights in the context of switching the electricity provider. We focus on customers of an online platform who can either choose a service that reminds them when they are allowed to switch their electricity contract or a service that automatically switches the contract on their behalf whenever possible. Our focus is on the intrinsic value of decision rights as a potential obstacle of this choice automation. Surprisingly, we find that customers who make use of the automation service assign significantly higher intrinsic value to their decision rights, compared to those who opted for the mere reminder. Hence, there appears to be a connection between having a high intrinsic value of decision rights and the level of interest in attributes of the automation service under consideration. The positive correlation suggests that the widespread positive intrinsic value of decision rights and the future adoption of similar automation services and devices do not necessarily contradict each other.

This paper compares two regimes of tradable emission permits, a regime with international permit trade (IPT) and a regime with domestic permit trade (DPT). We focus on the effects of the distribution of firms between countries. Our model combines intra-industry trade with a monopolistically competitive industry. We find that a more equal distribution of firms between countries results in higher global pollution under the DPT regime, while under the IPT regime the global pollution is invariant with the distribution of firms. We also find that international permit trade can either increase or reduce global pollution, depending on the distribution of firms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.