Scientific Conference Series Aida Fernández Ríos - María Loureiro: “Citizenship in light of climate change: socioeconomic aspects”
María Loureiro García, professor of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis, School of Economic and Business Science of the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), and elected member of the RAGC. Scientific Director of ECOBAS.
“Citizenship in light of climate change: socioeconomic aspects”
Climate change is one of the most global and worrying phenomena faced by citizens in the 21st century. This presentation analyzes how sentiments towards climate change are expressed and transmitted globally and generate possibilities for the implementation of mitigation and adaptation policies in different continents. In the news, there is increasing global awareness of the occurrence of climate change and its economic and social consequences; this is especially true in countries that have recently experienced extreme events. To conduct this analysis, we employ a database containing over 100 million records of Twitter conversations globally from 2019 to the present.
By proximity, we will focus on the European case and analyze it causally, with microeconomic empirical applications, like how the energy transition and its consequences on energy prices affect the perception on the need for climate policy.
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ECOBAS Research Seminar: Mar Reguant - Northwestern University & Barcelona School of Economics
We study the distributional impacts of real-time pricing (RTP) in the Spanish electricity market, which rolled out RTP as the default tariff for a large share of residential customers. We complement aggregate patterns of distributional effects with a method to infer individual households’ income using zip-code income distributions. We identify three channels for the distributional impacts of RTP: consumption patterns, appliance ownership, and location. The first channel makes the switch from monthly to hourly prices progressive since high-income households consume disproportionately more at peak times when real-time prices are higher. However, the other two channels make the switch from annual to monthly prices regressive: low-income households, who tend to have more electric heating, benefit from the price insurance provided by time-invariant prices during winter, when prices tend to be higher and more volatile. Given that prices differences are greater across months than within months, the regressive effect dominated. Using counterfactual experiments, we find that RTP makes low-income households particularly vulnerable to adverse weather shocks during winter. In the future, the wider adoption of enabling technologies (including storage and demand response devices) by the high-income groups might worsen the distributional impacts of RTP.
ECOBAS Research Seminar: Francisco Gómez-Martínez - Norwegian Business School
Existing evidence demonstrates that the degree of social homogeneity in a society correlates with various economic indicators. Using experimental techniques, we establish the causal impact of social proximity on socially responsible behavior in markets and its implications for economic welfare.
We develop an experimental market where low-cost production generates a negative externality to a third party, while high-cost production eliminates the externality. We compare behavior in groups
varying whether the third party shares a common identity with buyers and sellers (in-group condition) or not (out-group condition). Our findings indicate that socially responsible behavior is generally robust
across our treatments. However, reducing social heterogeneities improves economic welfare indicators: market prices are significantly higher and the number of offers rejected by the buyers becomes significantly lower. This leads to a striking reduction of economic inequality and improvement of market efficiency. Overall, our experiment shows that the social structure of market environments matters a great deal and has significant implications for the design of institutions.
ECOBAS Research Seminar: Brais Álvarez Pereira - UNova (Lisbon)
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JRC B2 Seminar. Exploring policy interventions for a just low-carbon transition: A scenario discovery approach - Nicola Campigotto
There is currently no consensus among scholars on how to achieve a just low-carbon transition. This paper subjects a macrosimulation model to an extensive sensitivity analysis, and trains random forests on the simulation results to identify which policy combinations are most effective in reducing carbon emissions while improving the distribution of income. The results suggest a trade-off between inequality and emissions, which limits the extent to which inequality can be addressed through the growth of bottom incomes alone, and indicate that environmental and distributive goals can be met jointly only through a variety of coherent policies in different domains.
ECOBAS Research Seminar: Javier López Prol - Yonsei University (South Korea)
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ABSTRACT: Opposite to traditional dispatchable technologies, wind and solar have a variable generation pattern. Due to the particular characteristics of electricity markets, this variability poses challenges to their integration, such as the cannibalization effect (decline of their market value as penetration increases), and curtailment. I will review these problems by presenting their quantification for California, and discuss some of the potential solutions, focusing on the potential benefits of spatial integration and deployment coordination of renewable resources across countries.
