Conference Agenda

Capacity-enhancing subsidies are known to jeopardize already shrinking fish stocks. International organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been a pioneer in advocating policies to eliminate subsidies that lead to overfishing. On the other hand, subsidies can increase national income of a country by generating increased revenue in the fishing industry. Benefits from subsidies are enhanced, particularly when they are costless, meaning they arise from external funding or donations without direct fiscal burden. Overall, the direct and indirect effects of fisheries subsidies are still unclear, thus adding to policy challenges. This paper gives insights into welfare analysis of cost-reducing subsidies in an open-access setting, accounting for fleet heterogeneity in productivity. The results show that in the short run, subsidies may contribute positively to welfare. In the long run, subsidies may either increase or decrease welfare, depending on whether the steady-state stock fish stock exceeds or falls below Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) level respectively.

As an alternative to rights-based management of the commons, we illustrate how open access combined with taxes can be applied to optimally structure a fishing fleet and

efficiently allocate harvest from a portfolio of species between vessel groups. Biological

over-exploitation is prevented by externally imposed limits on total output. The more

flexible a tax is, the closer the solution comes to the first-best outcome. If implementing

a flexible tax proves challenging due to social or political reasons, even less flexible taxes

can capture a significant portion of the resource rent and improve input composition,

as a second-best alternative. The taxes are easy to administer and manage as they are

collected on first-hand delivery.

This paper proposes an economic model for households’ heating and electricity consumption choices accounting for the possibility of installing a solar PV system, a heat pump, a battery storage, and use the grid. The aim is to identify the optimal investment in renewable energy equipment, accounting for households’ preferences. We use simulation data of a French house in Chambery. Results show that coupling a 6kW heat pump with 1.325 kWp solar panels is the optimal investment for the household. In addition, only scenarios in which there is no heat pump need to be supported by public policy to be economically viable for the household, showing the importance of considering heat pumps in renewable energy scenarios. On the other hand, investing in a battery is still not profitable because of its high cost and the lack of financial aid.

Uniform price trading, common in exchanges, is a flawed market design when demand is built by private selection into price-sensitive and insensitive technologies. We develop a price-capping mechanism leveraging aggregate bid schedules to buy and sell to maximize surplus within a uniform price setting. The resulting dynamic cap adjusts with demand changes, corrects technology choices, is robust to strategic bidding, and integrates into market-clearing routines. A demonstration shows it could have reduced electricity costs by €$3.36$ billion over $1,103$ hours in France during the energy crisis of 2022-23.