Conference Agenda

This paper investigates the impact of volatility in the upstream electric vehicles (EV) battery raw materials market on the downstream stock returns of individual EV producers. The study uses the daily stock returns of two lithium producers and the newly proposed EGARCH-EARJI model to capture the jump component of volatility in the EV battery raw materials market. The effect on individual stock returns of EV producers is studied via the adjusted Fama-French model with the jump factor. The results indicate that jumps exist in the EV battery raw materials market and ripple through stock returns of EV producers, having a stronger effect on those specializing in EVs solely.

Colombia implemented its carbon tax in 2017, becoming the 3rd country in Latin America and the 23rd in the world to have one. It is an important example of how middle and low-income countries have started implementing this market-based strategy. This paper seeks to understand the effects of the Colombian tax on the emissions of CO2. I use several counterfactual estimators to identify the causal impact of the carbon tax on Colombian’ CO2 emissions per capita. I find conflicting evidence. The preferred estimates suggest that the tax has reduced emissions per capita by 6 to 8 percent of the pre-tax emissions. However, the results are not statistically significant. An alternative identification strategy, relying on regional exemptions, does not find statistically significant effects of the tax rate on the consumption of selected fuels. The results suggest that design elements, such as the rate size and the tax exemptions, could be responsible for the lack of statistical significance by making the results too low to be identified.

Climate change is a critical environmental challenge in our world. OECD countries have been among the fast-growing economies in the world over the last years, and rapid economic growth is linked with the problem of excessive energy usage and GHG emissions. Hence, this study examines the impact of energy prices along with other socio-economic predictors on CO2 emissions in OECD countries. Our study fills this gap using the STIRPAT model, offering novel insights into the relationship between various oil prices – Brent, OPEC, and WTI –, socio-economic variables, and carbon emissions. We employ both static and dynamic panel regression models for time period from 1990 to 2020. Our findings reveal an inverse relationship between oil prices and CO2 emissions in OECD countries. Higher prices for Brent, OPEC, and WTI oil are associated with reduced carbon emissions. Additionally, our causality analysis demonstrates significant linkages between socio-economic factors such as GDP, urbanization, education, and carbon emissions, highlighting the complex nature of environmental challenges.

Energy crises can alter the incentives of utilities to temporally promote energy-saving behavior. This paper takes advantage of a natural gas saving reward program, implemented by a major German utility during the heating season of the European energy crisis of 2022/23, to provide evidence for the effectiveness of financial incentives for energy conservation on a large scale. Using billing records from the universe of residential customers of the utility, we find that program participants reduce their gas consumption by 5.4 percent compared to a matched control group. Rich tracking data on the pre-intervention engagement of customers with information on their energy consumption allows us to address selection bias. We find that more active and already motivated customers, for whom the financial value of the reward is comparably low, are more likely to select into treatment. Failure to account for self-selection would lead to an overestimation of the treatment effect by about 25 percent. Work in progress utilizes precise geo-location and socio-economic characteristics to move beyond average treatment effects towards optimal targeting of financial incentive schemes. A mechanism analysis will further distinguish between the direct effect of the financial treatment and the indirect effect induced by the program, which requires customers to actively seek information about their consumption.

Digital technologies can play an important role in stringent climate scenarios, particularly given their ``general purpose'' nature. Yet, little evidence is available on their relation with energy demand, energy efficiency and associated carbon emissions. In this paper, we study the relationship between ICT use, measured by ICT workers, and energy consumption as well efficiency (energy consumption to value added) for French single-plant firms the years 2003-2019. Our preliminary results can be summarised as follow. On the one hand, ICT use is associated with lower energy intensity. Importantly, we find evidence that ICT workers increase energy efficiency more substantially than non-ICT workers. On the other hand, ICT use is associated with an increase in energy use. Similarly, ICT workers contributes more than non-ICT workers to increase energy demand. Both results are driven by the dynamics of electricity consumption rather than other energy sources.

This paper evaluates the impact of a 2 billion euro car replacement program implemented in France since 2018.

Using a unique administrative data set, we employ various identification strategies, mostly relying on regression discontinuity designs, to identify the causal impact of the policy on household's scrappage and purchase behaviors.

First, we find that the policy had a large effect on car scrappage, with an increase of 30-50% of scrappage. However, we identify that ownership behaviors are barely affected by the policy. In contrast, we find that households have scraped their cars instead of selling them on the used car market. For the first years of the policy, we estimate that this substitution caused a 15% decrease in used car trade. The size of this effect makes the policy effectiveness particularly remarkable compared to other similar policies.

Using a large set of online car ads data, we estimate that this drop in used car supply increases prices by 1%.

Second, we find the policy successful in the sense that the replaced vehicles are much cleaner than without the policy.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, disrupted gas supplies to Europe and started a period of high and volatile energy prices. By crowding out fossil fuels, renewables can lower the exposure of electricity prices to gas prices. The variation in fuel prices provide ideal conditions to empirically test the merit model in power generation. Our main empirical model measures the effect of gas and coal prices on power prices, moderated by thermal demand and instrumented by weather conditions. Our method shows that while (expensive) gas is the main driver of electricity prices in times of high thermal demand, renewables shift the marginal source of electricity from gas to coal to non-fossil fuels, thereby substantially reducing the pass-through of gas prices during the energy crisis.

In a second step, we develop an empirical model to directly estimate the substitution of renewables for other power generation technologies, which we use to simulate a counterfactual analysis by increasing solar energy and wind energy by 1 TWh (annual) in separate scenarios. The additional solar (wind) capacity leads to a large reduction of power prices by 0.78 (0.68) \euro/MWh and shifts rents from thermal power supply to consumers. Our simulation indicates a reduction in thermal residual demand by coal of 0.26 (0.34) TWh and by gas of 0.17 (0.15) TWh.

A large share of the additional solar (wind) energy, 56 (47) $\%$ is absorbed by pumped storage and electricity exports, while the typical absorption mechanism of increased demand plays only a minor role.