Recently, a paper was presented at our university that showed a significant effect for a variable of interest but had a relatively small number of observations. One colleague suggested that we should consider the significance of the results with care since the number of observations was fairly small. This ignited ... [Read more...]

I like to start my courses in energy economics and environmental economics by asking some question like Which energy source, e.g. gas, coal, nuclear, oil, renewables had the largest absolute increase in world wide energy consumption between the years 2000 und 2016? And then show some data. Below you can see ... [Read more...]

Recently, I have written and hosted several multi-user Shiny apps. One example, is Taddle that runs on my server at http://taddle.mathematik.uni-ulm.de. Taddle is a multi-user shiny app that offers a free and simple way to allocate seminar topics. (Nex... [Read more...]

One very important benefit of stronger environmental protection is to reduce the damaging effects of pollution on human health. In his very interesting article “The Consequences of Industrialization: Evidence from Water Pollution and Digestive Cance... [Read more...]

It is widely recognized that aggressive securitization of housing loans played a decisive role in the creating of a house price bubble in the US and the subsequent financial crisis. An open question is in how far financial experts on securitization wer... [Read more...]

Nowadays, a lot of interesting time series data is freely available that allows us to compare important economic, social and environmental trends across countries. I feel that one can learn a lot by surfing through the data sections on the websites of... [Read more...]

How much pollution reduction do we get from a MWh electricity produced by wind or solar power? In principle, this corresponds to the avoided pollution of a fossil fuel plant that reduces its output due to the higher production of renewable electricity.... [Read more...]

Which policy instruments should we use to cost-effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions? For a given technological level there are many economic arguments in favour of tradeable emission certificates or a carbon tax: they generate static efficiency ... [Read more...]

What is the causal impact of the TseTse fly on historical and current development in Africa? Marcella Alsan studies this question in her fascinating article ‘The effect of the TseTse fly on African development’ in the American Economic Review, 2015... [Read more...]

The environmental Kuznets curve hypothesizes an inverted u-shape relationship between income and environmental degradation: while richer countries tend to invest more ressources into environmental protection as their income rises, income growth in poor... [Read more...]

Many economists would agree that the most efficient way to fight global warming would be a world-wide tax or an emmission trading system for greenhouse gases. Yet, if only a part of the world implements such a scheme, a reasonable concern is that firms... [Read more...]

A key question of environmental economics is to economically quantify damages from different types of pollution and benefits from environmental policy that attempts to reduce pollution. Often only indirect measures are available. An important measure i... [Read more...]

There is quite some sceptisim towards TTIP, the currently negotiated free trade agreement between Europe and the USA. Even in an exporting nation like Germany, there are substantial worries about reduction in consumer protection standards, or fear of limits to democracy if cooperations can sue states in international settlement courts. ... [Read more...]

Christopher Knittel estimates in his article Automobiles on Steroids: Product Attribute Trade-Offs and Technological Progress in the Automobile Sector (American Economic Review, 2011) the technological progress that has occurred since 1980 in the aut... [Read more...]

As an economist, I consider public procurement of construction projects a very interesting topic. While several firms may initially bid for a project and propose prices, the news in Germany are regulary filled with construction projects whose costs went far beyond those that were initially agreed upon. For example, Wikipedia ... [Read more...]

What is the real world impact of tv series? Did Brazilian women get fewer children because they watched soap operas that portray happy, rich families that have few children? Clara Ulmer has written a very nice RTutor problem set that allows you interactively explore this question in R. It is ... [Read more...]

RTutor: Credit Booms Gone Bust 2015-07-09 12:00:00 Currently, quite a few students here at Ulm University create RTutor problem sets based on economic articles as part of their Bachelor or Master thesis. RTutor is an R package that allows to develop interactive R problem sets, that can be solved in ... [Read more...]

RTutor is a new R package that allows to develop interactive R exercises. Problem sets can be solved off-line or can be hosted online via shiny server. Try out an Interactive Problem Set about Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes Jonas Send has written a very nice interactive R problem ... [Read more...]

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