IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/zewdip/312183.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Regulated correlations - Climate policy and investment risks

Author

Listed:
  • Neupert-Zhuang, Menglu
  • Schenker, Oliver

Abstract

Investments in energy technologies are substantially governed by climate policy. We demonstrate analytically that price-based instruments, such as carbon-taxes, and quantity-based regulations, like emission trading systems, have distinct effects on the (co-)variance of power plant profits. If investors are risk-averse, these differ- ences lead to divergent investment portfolios, breaking the equivalence of price- and quantity-based policy instruments under risk-neutrality. Using the European power sector as a case study, we calibrate an electricity market model with stochastic de- mand and find that, compared to a carbon tax, emissions trading pushes up the share of fossil fuel assets in a representative investor's portfolio since counteracting effects of permit and electricity prices reduce the covariance with other technologies, thereby enhancing the diversification value of these assets. Uncertainty about the stringency of carbon taxes leads to lower shares of fossil fuel assets with increasing risk aversion.

Suggested Citation

  • Neupert-Zhuang, Menglu & Schenker, Oliver, 2024. "Regulated correlations - Climate policy and investment risks," ZEW Discussion Papers 24-064, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:312183
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/312183/1/dp24064.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Climate policy; Investment under uncertainty; Modern Portfolio Theory; Risk aversion;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • E22 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Investment; Capital; Intangible Capital; Capacity
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • P48 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Other Economic Systems - - - Legal Institutions; Property Rights; Natural Resources; Energy; Environment; Regional Studies

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:zewdip:312183. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/zemande.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.