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Kraftstoffpreise werden weltweit maßgeblich durch Staatseingriffe in Form von Steuern und Subventionen beeinflusst. Die meisten Staaten haben mittlerweile Steuern implementiert und nur noch wenige, vor allem einige erdölexportierende Länder, subventionieren Kraftstoffe. Jedoch geht auch in diesen Ländern der Trend immer stärker zur Abschaffung der überaus teuren Subventionen. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über die Gründe der staatliche Eingriffe in die Preisbildung und zeigt, welche Staaten Kraftstoffe besteuern und welche sie subventionieren.

This paper describes how limited liability leads to risk-loving behaviour in nuclear power companies and unsafe nuclear power plants. By reviewing current regulatory regimes, we show that this issue is not being sufficiently addressed today. Therefore, we evaluate five regulatory instruments: (1) safety regulation, (2) minimum equity requirements, (3) mandatory insurance, (4) risk-sharing pools, and (5) catastrophe bonds. We conclude that none of these instruments in its pure form can be recommended. Thus, we propose a new approach that, in its core, consists of a two-stage procedure. In the first stage, capital markets assess the risk stemming from each nuclear power plant via catastrophe bonds. In the second step, the regulator uses this private risk assessment and intervenes by charging an actuarially fair premium in the form of a Pigouvian risk fee. Society ultimately acts as an explicit insurer for nuclear risk and is, on average, fairly compensated for the risk it is taking over.

It is frequently observed that the implementation of green policies is delayed compared to the initial announcement. Considering a setting with a representative monopolist extracting a non-renewable resource, we demonstrate that announcing a green policy, but then delaying its implementation, is associated with a larger cumulative extraction at any point in time than announcing a late implementation of this policy at the outset.

A number of recent papers extend traditional Hotelling frameworks by the topical issue of climate change. They study the effects of different environmental taxes on the resource extraction paths and derive important and far-reaching policy implications. In particular the most recent strain of literature devoted to the so called Green Paradox shows how over various economic channels a steady increase in environmental taxation rather accelerates resource extraction instead of resulting in the desired slow down. The cause of this paradox lies in the inability to tax the supply side of the resource and thus limits the policy instruments to the demand. Thus, e.g. an oil-sheikh has an interest to sell his oil while it is still relatively low taxed and he can still generate higher profits. This effect could be seen as a kind of intertemporal carbon leakage transferring future extraction to the present. The Green Paradox literature generally concludes that a binding global certifcate system covering all CO2 sources is the only solution and that attempts of implementing greener policies in the transition process are counterproductive. However, the underlying implicit assumption is that extraction capacities are suffcient and that capacity adjustments are costless. Our paper accounts for an endogenous capacity building decision under convex adjustment costs by extending the original Hotelling type formulation of the Green Paradox. The analysis shows that for typical assumptions about the cost structure greener policies stay a useable instrument in the transition process. We are able to define the necessary conditions for the policy measures to be effective and show that the evaluation of the Green Paradox differs for pre and post oil-peak regimes.