Energy Tax Exemptions and Industrial Production

Do Manufacturing Plants Respond to Exogenous Changes in Electricity Prices? Evidence From Administrative Micro-Data

“…21 Note that reassuringly, the RES exemption studied by Gerster and Lamp (2020), which is included as a control variable in our analysis, enters with a statistically significant positive coefficient into the regression of electricity procurement, in line with the results of Gerster and Lamp (2020).…”

“…7 7 We mention this channel here because plants in Germany have experienced several changes in electricity pricing due to regulation. In particular, over the study period, the exemption options for the renewable energy surcharge were amended resulting in a substantial increase in exempt plants which is studied in Gerster and Lamp (2020). In addition, the EU ETS prices were much lower than most people Summarizing, there are good reasons to believe that the response to rising electricity prices is not constant over time.…”

“…Due to several empirical challenges, in particular the unavailability of electricity price data and the endogeneity of electricity prices, as of today, these indirect effects of climate policy measures on firm performance are much more poorly understood. Studies focussing on the effects of electricity prices typically rely on quasi-experimental designs such that effects are estimated on specific subsets of the data which puts limits on their external validity (Gerster and Lamp, 2020;Flues and Lutz, 2015;Martin et al, 2014). In this paper, we contribute by studying the effects of an exogenous source of variation within electricity prices, specifically electricity network charges, on the electricity usage behaviour as well as several competitiveness indicators of German manufacturing plants.…”

Is Germany Becoming the European Pollution Haven?

“…What is more, the increase in carbon emissions occurs over a period in which existing research has mostly found these individual policy measures to be effective in ex-post causal effect analyses (see e.g. Lamp, 2022 andRottner, 2022 on the effects of electricity prices, and Lehr et al, 2020 on the effect of the EU ETS). If climate policies are effective at reducing emissions all else equal, why have emissions increased nevertheless?…”

(Mis)allocation of Renewable Energy Sources

“…3 While FiTs have been an effective tool in increasing the penetration of RES, they are also expensive. In 2015 alone the total subsidy accounted for roughly 22 billion euros and financing the subsidy has led to an intense political debate about how to distribute the total cost between different consumer groups (see for instance Gerster and Lamp [2020]). The location of RES also has implications for the dispersion of benefits from new products such as electric vehicles (Holland et al [2016]) and for electricity storage (Sinn [2017], Zerrahn et al [2018]).…”