Contributions in Merlin

Governance for sustainable development requires policy coherence and Environmental Policy Integration, which are being hindered by difficulties coordinating the two separate impact assessment processes being conducted in the European Commission. One of them, the Commission-wide Impact Assessment process, looks primarily at EU-internal impacts, whereas the other one, Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) in DG Trade, looks outward to other countries and intergovernmental organizations. Ideally, the two processes should complement one another, especially as the two are set to continue being done in parallel. The paper uses a case study of the reform of the European sugar regime under a World Trade Organization ruling to demonstrate how the two impact assessment processes could better complement one another. Feedback from the experience had with existing trade agreements could then promote policy learning and inform the negotiations on new agreements. The number of new bilateral and Regional Trade Agreements is expected to continue rising, thus increasing the importance of the Commission-wide Impact Assessment process required for them. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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In den letzten Monaten haben energiepolitische Themen Schlagzeilen gemacht. Zum einen, weil sich die Bevölkerung zunehmend um die Auswirkungen der globalen Erwärmung sorgt. Zum anderen – der wohl wichtigere Grund –, weil die stark ansteigenden Energiepreise in vielen Haushaltsbudgets ihre Spuren hinterlassen haben. Nicht nur an der Tankstelle erreichen die Treibstoffpreise neue Höchststände. Auch nach dem jüngsten Preisrückgang bleiben sie gut doppelt so hoch wie 2003. Zudem haben verschiedene Elektrizitätsversorger weitere Preis anpassungen nach oben angekündigt. Energie als ein Aspekt der Nachhaltigkeit Wer heute in Immobilien investiert – sei es als Eigen heimbesitzer oder als institutioneller Investor – kann weder die Energiefrage noch das Thema der Nachhaltigkeit umgehen. Begriffe wie «Nachhaltigkeit » und «Energieeffi zienz» müssen allerdings konkretisiert werden. Für Personen, die keine Baufachleute sind, ist es schwierig zu beurteilen, ob eine Liegenschaft nachhaltig gebaut wurde. In dieser Situation können Labels oder Ratings als Entscheidungshilfe dienen. Ein in der Schweiz bereits gut etabliertes Energie-Label wird vom Verein Minergie vergeben. Mit über 10 000 zertifi zierten Liegenschaften gehört Minergie zu den bekanntesten Öko- Labels. Das Label erhalten Gebäude, die spezifi sche Grenzwerte für den Energieverbrauch einhalten (siehe Box). Damit kann die geforderte Bauqualität quantifi ziert und eine zuverlässige Bewertung ab ge geben werden. Lohnt sich Minergie? Diese Studie versucht am Beispiel des Minergie- Labels, einige grundlegende energieökonomische Fragen, die sich potenzielle Eigenheimbesitzer oder Immobilieninvestoren vermehrt stellen, pragmatisch zu beantworten. «Lohnt sich Minergie?» ist eine der Fragen, denen die vorliegende Arbeit nachgeht. Die Arbeit beschränkt sich nicht auf die Kosten/ Nutzen-Analyse von energiesparenden Investitionen. Ebenso wichtig ist zu wissen, ob und wie der Immobilienmarkt – damit sind alle Käufer und Verkäufer von Liegenschaften gemeint – energiesparende Massnahmen bewertet und einschätzt. Um ein Ergebnis dieser Studie vorwegzunehmen: es ist durchaus denkbar, dass die Mehrkosten, die die Einhaltung des Minergie-Standards verursacht, die erwarteten Ersparnisse übersteigen. Dennoch werden diese Mehrkosten vom Markt entschädigt. Es besteht offensichtlich eine Nachfrage nach umweltfreundlichen, energiesparenden Bauinvestitionen – auch wenn diese Nachfrage noch relativ klein und vor allem im gehobenen Marktsegment angesiedelt ist. Die ökonometrische Analyse in der vorliegenden Studie umfasst Minergie-Wohngebäude im Kanton Zürich, da einzig für den Kanton Zürich Daten in ausreichender Qualität vorliegen. Die öffentlich verfügbaren Daten zu Minergie-Liegenschaften wurden für differenzierte Analysen mit eigenen Daten beständen verknüpft.

This dissertation collects three essays on the hedonic modelling of housing prices, location attributes and environmental amenities – or lack thereof. The first essay applies spatial econometric techniques to measure the impact of airport noise on the price of single-family homes in the Zurich Airport area. We exploit a large database of geo-referenced noise measurements to investigate the reaction of house prices to different noise metrics. The particular institutional setting of Zurich Airport, with a changing pattern of runway configurations allows to distinguish the impact of noise at different times of the day. The use of neighborhood fixed-effects is compared to the results given by a costlier modelling strategy involving a rich set of location descriptors. We document the impact of airport noise on housing prices. In the base model specification, the Noise Discount Index, i.e. the percentage depreciation per dB of aircraft noise, is 0:97%. Typical discounts are in the range of –2% to –8%. The results are similar to comparable Swiss and international studies on the impact of aircraft noise on residential property prices. From a methodological point of view, we show that accounting for the spatiality of the data has little effect on the results. In the second essay we estimate the willingness to pay for housing attributes of single-family home owners located in the greater Zurich area. A revealed-preferences approach is used, in which a structural hedonic model is identified and estimated. Our approach explicitly accounts for the heterogeneity of preferences of the owner-occupiers. Again, we use the GIS to match the data describing the housing characteristics and the attributes of the location to the socioeconomic traits of the owners. We perform a nonparametric estimation of the hedonic model that allows us to recover the preference parameters. We measure the impact of income differences on the willingness to pay for five major characteristics, i.e. travel time to the city center, size and age of the housing unit, lot size and proximity to a major environmental amenity, the Lake of Zurich. We show that the willingness to pay for the environmental amenity and for centrality is highly income elastic, while the demand for the lot size and for the house surface is not. We put the model in the context of the new urban economic literature which studies the importance of amenities for the location decision of households in cities. In the last part of the dissertation, we touch on another typical urban economics topic – the elasticity of substitution between capital and land. This concept is key in understanding some important phenomena like urban sprawl or urban density. Combining two new rich data sets on disaggregated land and house transactions, we propose one of the first estimates of this elasticity for a non-U.S. metropolitan region. For the region of Zurich we find an elasticity of substitution of 0:6 and an own-price elasticity of the demand for land of –0.5. These relatively low estimates imply that a policy aiming at restricting the supply of open spaces and limiting the availability of unimproved land may have a large impact on house prices.

Economists have forcefully argued for the introduction and use of property derivatives as a hedge against house price risk (e.g. Shiller and Weiss, 1999). The rationale for these financial instruments seems clear, as many households are heavily invested in housing and standard financial instruments offer a poor hedge. In practice, however, most of the property derivatives available have been targeted to meet the needs of institutional investors, not those of owner-occupiers. Building on the recent launch of the first Swiss property derivative, we here propose index-linked mortgages tailored to retail consumers. The payments of these mortgages depend on the corresponding housing market performance. We further price the instruments, discuss the stabilization of the homeowner's net wealth, and quantify the expected decrease in the mortgage default risk achieved by this immunization effect.

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This research investigates whether consumers judge the environmental quality of food products differently according to whether the products are presented separately or jointly and whether assimilation or contrast effects are more likely to occur. Study 1 revealed contrast effects when products were judged in separate evaluation. Study 2 revealed assimilation effects when products were judged in joint evaluation. Increasing the range of the product alternatives, however, produced a displacement of the judgments in the opposite direction, indicating contrast effects again. Comparing the environmental judgments across both studies, reversal effects in judgments and ordering of products could be demonstrated. Overall, the findings underline that environmental judgments are highly unstable and context-dependent.

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