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This paper illustrates the main results of an expert elicitation survey on advanced (second and third generation) biofuel technologies. The survey focuses on eliciting probabilistic information on the future costs of advanced biofuels and on the potential role of Research, Development and Demonstration (RD&D) efforts in reducing these costs and in supporting the deployment of biofuels in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD countries. Fifteen leading experts from different EU member states provide insights on the future potential of advanced biofuel technologies both in terms of costs and diffusion. This information results in a number of policy recommendations with respect to public RD&D strategies and is an important contribution to the integrated assessment modelling community.

Do consumers value the fuel economy of cars? In this paper we examine this question, taking advantage of the recent introduction of hybrid and battery-electric vehicles, which promise to reduce the use of fossil fuels in road transport, and hence carbon emissions and dependence on oil imports. The price of these vehicles may however create hurdles to their widespread adoption. Automakers claim that these technologies come with higher production costs. Consumers should be willing to pay a price differential for these cars just equal to the savings in fuel costs—unless their utility depends on considerations beyond car quality, performance and fuel economy. We specifically ask three related questions. First, do consumers value fuel economy, even among all-electric and hybrids? Second, do the prices of electric vehicles reflect the so-called “range anxiety”? Third, is there evidence of an all-electric or hybrid “premium” above and beyond the savings in fuel costs made possible by these cars over their conventional counterparts? We answer these questions using detailed data on new cars sold in eight European Union countries from January 2011 to September 2017, combined with gasoline, diesel and electricity prices and taxation information. Using hedonic pricing regressions and careful sample design, we find that, all else the same, more fuel-efficient variants of the same cars do cost more, but either the fuel economy is undercapitalized, or consumers and automakers are assuming a payback period of 2.5-4.6 years. We also find evidence of large all-electric and plug-in hybrid premiums above and beyond the savings in fuel costs, while regular hybrids cars carry a modest premium—one that is comparable to that of diesel cars or other types of technologies. Individuals who purchase all-electric or plug-in hybrids may be motivated by other considerations in addition to fuel costs, or automakers may be setting prices to take advantage of government incentives. We find no evidence that the prices of all-electric cars reflect their battery range.

This paper evaluates the historical influence of energy prices on a series of measures of environmental and economic performance for a panel of French manufacturing establishments over the period 1997-2010. The focus on energy prices is motivated by the fact that changes in environmental and energy policies have been dominated by substantial reductions in discounts for large consumers, making the evaluation of each policy in isolation exceedingly difficult. To identify price effects, we construct a shift-share instrument that captures only the exogenous variation in establishment-specific energy prices. Our results highlight a trade-off between environmental and economic goals: although a 10 percent increase in energy prices brings about a 6 percent reduction in energy consumption and an 11 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, such an increase also has a modestly negative impact on employment (-2.6 percent) and very small impact on wages and productivity. The negative employment effects are mostly concentrated in energy-intensive and trade-exposed sectors. Simulating the effect of a carbon tax, we show that job losses for the most exposed sectors can be quite large. However, these effects are upper bounds and we show that they are significantly mitigated in multi-establishment firms by labor reallocation across establishments.

Increasing the realism with respect to the representation of actors, decision-making, and institutions is critical to better understand the transition towards a low-carbon sustainable society since actors, decision-making, and institutions are the defining elements of transition pathways. In this paper, we explore how this can be done by conducting a model-based scenario analysis. The increasing focus on implementation and transition dynamics towards long-term objectives requires a better comprehension of what drives change and how those changes can be accelerated. We explore opportunities that arise from a deeper engagement of quantitative systems modeling with socio-technical transitions studies, initiative-based learning, and applied economics. We argue that a number of opportunities for enriching the realism in model-based scenario analysis can arise through model refinements oriented towards a more detailed approach in terms of actor heterogeneity, as well as through integration across different analytical and disciplinary approaches.

With a focus on alternative methods for accelerating clean energy policy adoption, this study introduces an innovative financing scheme for renewable and energy efficiency deployment. Financing barriers represent a notable obstacle for energy improvements and this is particularly the case for low-income households. Limited access to credit, due to socio-economic status and the lack of guarantees, are key issues related to financing barriers. Implementing a policy such as PACE – Property Assessed Clean Energy – allows for the provision of up-front funds for residential property owners to install electric and thermal solar systems and make energy-efficiency improvements to their buildings. This paper will inform the design of better policies tailored to the creation of the appropriate conditions for such investments to occur, especially when the lack of access to capital tends to stall them.

A living lab is a physical or virtual space in which to solve societal challenges, especially for urban areas, by bringing together various stakeholders for collaboration and collective ideation. Although the notion has received increasing attention from scholars, practitioners and policy makers, its essence remains unclear to many. We therefore performed a systematic literature review of a sample of 114 scholarly articles about living labs to understand the central facets discussed in the nascent literature. In particular, we explored the origin of the living lab concept and its key paradigms and characteristics, including stakeholder roles, contexts, challenges, main outcomes, and sustainability. While doing this, we discovered that the number of publications about living labs has increased significantly since 2015, and several journals are very active in publishing articles on the topic. The living lab is considered a multidisciplinary phenomenon and it encompasses various research domains despite typically being discussed under open and user innovation paradigms. What is more, the existing literature views living labs simultaneously as landscapes, real-life environments, and methodologies, and it suggests that they include heterogeneous stakeholders and apply various business models, methods, tools and approaches. Finally, living labs face some challenges, such as temporality, governance, efficiency, user recruitment, sustainability, scalability and unpredictable outcomes. In contrast, the benefits include tangible and intangible innovation and a broader diversity of innovation. Based on our analysis, we provide some implications and suggestions for future research.

Climate change impacts are stochastic and highly uncertain and moreover heterogeneous across regions. That is, there is a potential to sharing this risk ex-ante across regions and hence to reduce the welfare-economic costs of these risks. We analyze how climate risks could be reduced via an insurance scheme at the global scale across regions and quantify the potential welfare gains. We introduce risk sharing of global climate risk represented by the equilibrium climate sensitivity, and introduce an asset-based insurance scheme to allow for risk sharing across regions. We estimate that such risk sharing scheme could lead to welfare gains reducing the global costs of climate change by up to 15%. Such a scheme implies transfers of about USD 200 billion per year and faces important implementation challenges. The results provide a motivation for the loss and damage mechanism related negotiations about sharing risks of climate change at the global level.