Manuel Frondel Knihy

Based on a survey among more than 5,000 German households and a single-binary choice experiment in which we randomly split the respondents into two groups, this paper elicits both households’ willingness to pay (WTP) for power supply security and their willingness to accept (WTA) compensations for a reduced security level. In accord with numerous empirical studies, we find that the mean WTA value substantially exceeds the mean WTP bid, in our empirical example by a factor of 3.56. Yet, the WTA-WTP ratio decreases to 2.35 among respondents who believe that the hypothetical valuation setting is likely to become true. Conversely, the WTA-WTP ratio increases to 3.81 among respondents who deem the setting unlikely. On the basis of these results, we conclude that inquiring about respondents’ perception of the realism of the valuation setting is an easy-to-implement and promising survey element to mitigate excessive WTA-WTP disparities, particularly if private or quasi-public goods are under scrutiny

Drawing on panel data on daily fuel prices covering over 5,000 filling stations in Germany, this paper documents a change in the stations' price setting behavior following the introduction of a legally mandated online price portal in 2013. Prior to the portal, positive asymmetry is found on the basis of error correction models, with prices following the "rockets and feathers" pattern that is typically found for fuels. In the aftermath of the portal, by contrast, negative asymmetry is observed: fuel price decreases in response to refinery price decreases are stronger than fuel price increases due to refinery price increases

As of late 2008, the steady decline of U.S. crude oil production over the last decades was reversed by the increased adoption of the hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") technology. Adapting the supply-side model proposed by Kaufmann et al. (2004) to assess OPEC's ability to influence real oil prices, this paper investigates the effect of the increase in U.S. oil production due to fracking on world oil prices. Among our key results obtained from (dynamic) OLS estimations, there is a statistically significant negative long-run relationship between increased U.S. oil production and oil prices

Discrete-continuous models have become a common technique for addressing selectivity biases in data sets with endogenously partitioned observational units. Alternative two-stage approaches have been suggested by LEE (1983), DUBIN and MCFADDEN (1984), and DAHL (2002), all of which capture the first-stage discrete choice by the multinomial logit model, while the second-stage outcome equation is estimated using OLS. The nonlinearity introduced by the selection bias correction implies that the second-stage coefficients cannot be interpreted as marginal effects. Instead, the marginal effects are obtained using the estimates from both the first and second stages, a step that has been widely neglected in the applied literature. After deriving formulae for the marginal effects obtained from these selection correction approaches, we estimate a joint model of automobile ownership and distance driven to quantify the rebound effect, the behaviorally induced increase in driving that results from higher fuel economy. Our example illustrates that the pattern of rebound effects varies substantially depending on the method of selection bias correction