Nicole Grunewald’s research while affiliated with University of Göttingen and other places

This research focuses on identifying the main policy strategies that could potentially contribute to the advance of three Latin American economies, namely Brazil, Chile and Mexico towards a green growth model that is social and inclusive, given the actual patterns of development of those economies. With this aim, we first identify and describe past and current policies in each country in terms of economic, social and environmental indicators. A detailed analysis follows for Brazil, Chile and Mexico, in which we propose a series of green growth indicators and choose a definition and classification of green growth sectors. We estimate an empirical model to explain the determinants of greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation in Latin American countries. We broadly identify the sectors that contribute to its increase and describe the main green policies applied in each country. In turn we identify the sectors with higher potential for the future. Finally, we present policy recommendations and reflections for the future.

This research focuses on identifying the main policy strategies that could potentially contribute to the advance of three Latin American economies, namely Brazil, Chile and Mexico towards a green growth model that is social and inclusive, given the actual patterns of development of those economies. With this aim, we first identify and describe past and current policies in each country in terms of economic, social and environmental indicators. A detailed analysis follows for Brazil, Chile and Mexico, in which we propose a series of green growth indicators and choose a definition and classification of green growth sectors. We estimate an empirical model to explain the determinants of greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation in Latin American countries. We broadly identify the sectors that contribute to its increase and describe the main green policies applied in each country. In turn we identify the sectors with higher potential for the future. Finally, we present policy recommendations and reflections for the future.

In the last two decades increasing attention has been paid to the relationship between environmental degradation and economic development. According to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis this relationship may be described by an inverted-U curve. However, recent evidence rejects the EKC hypothesis for GHG emissions in a broad sense. In this paper we aim to investigate whether the EKC behavior for CO2 emissions could be proved on the behalf of institutional regulations. We analyze the driving factors of CO2 for developed and developing countries to test the theory of the EKC in the context of environmental regulations using a static and dynamic panel data model. We consider the Kyoto Protocol and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The results from this study indicate that the Kyoto obligations have a reducing effect on CO2 emissions in developed and developing countries.

We analyze the relationship between subjective well-being as a non-income welfare measure and climate variables such as temperature, precipitation rates or cloud covered days. Therewith, we estimate the effects from events related to climate change on subjective well-being and point out possible welfare losses and gains due to climate change. Even though that there is a growing number of research done on well-being in terms of income measures and climate change, there is only little research done on the effect of climate change and non-income measures such as subjective well-being. Further those studies lack some comparison. Except Rehdanz and Maddison (2005) all studies turn to national analyses when analyzing the influence of climate on subjective well-being. So far there are very few studies on middle- and none on low-income countries done, but at the same time extreme weather events may especially affect people in poorer countries. Therefore, we test this relationship for low and middle-income countries in Latin America and put the results in comparison to earlier studies. We apply survey data from the World Value Survey and Latinobarometro which cover the years 1985- 2008. In a panel study we estimate subjective well-being in Latin America and control for gender, age, marital status and income. Further we introduce climate variables such as the deviation from the mean temperature and precipitation rates as to analyze how the rising variance in climate affects subjective well being. --

We introduce a new hybrid approach to joint estimation of Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) for high quantiles of return distributions. We investigate the relative performance of VaR and ES models using daily returns for sixteen stock market indices (eight from developed and eight from emerging markets) prior to and during the 2008 financial crisis. In addition to widely used VaR and ES models, we also study the behavior of conditional and unconditional extreme value (EV) models to generate 99 percent confidence level estimates as well as developing a new loss function that relates tail losses to ES forecasts. Backtesting results show that only our proposed new hybrid and Extreme Value (EV)-based VaR models provide adequate protection in both developed and emerging markets, but that the hybrid approach does this at a significantly lower cost in capital reserves. In ES estimation the hybrid model yields the smallest error statistics surpassing even the EV models, especially in the developed markets.

In this paper we analyze the driving factors of CO 2 emissions in the context of environmental regulations using a dynamic panel data model for the period 1960 to 2009. Given the current policy debate and the importance of evaluating the effectiveness in terms of emission reductions of the already established climate agreements, we investigate to what extent emission reduction obligations from the Kyoto Protocol have an effect on CO 2 emissions. The main results indicate that obligations from the Kyoto Protocol have a reducing effect on CO 2 emissions.