Course: Exploring Possible Futures: Modeling in Environmental and Energy Economics

Economic models come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from small scale exercises to visualize conceptual findings, over firm and market models focusing on microeconomic interactions, to large scale energy …

Every long term forecast of economic developments is based on some form of numerical modeling. In essence a numerical model is a theoretic model with numbers. A basic understanding of …

Building models can only be learned via doing it. This is why we provide an assignment in which we ask you to build your own environmental or energy economic model. …

Avoiding serious climate change requires us to reduce our emissions right now. Voluntary approaches have failed, thus many countries turned to policy instruments, such as emission taxes, emissions trading, and …

As the final steps in our modeling work, we want to discuss how to introduce different policy instruments in our models, how to introduce further complications, such as market power, …

Economic models consist of building blocks. In addition to these blocks, we need three more types of building blocks for our construction: consumer behaviour markets natural environment These blocks serve …

You have seen that environmental and energy economic models consist of different types of building blocks and we have discussed the first and most important type of building block: Firm …

In general, many economic models consist of a small number of standard building blocks. These standard building blocks are parts of a model that are well understood and that have …

Model structure Modeling can be structured into four main phases: First, we have to understand our problem: What question do we want to answer? Do we want to analyse an …

Economic models are useful and often necessary to answer pressing questions. But like all models they have limitations that need to be understood. It is very important to build models …

Similar to models used in physics or engineering, economic models are formal models. However, they cannot be easily tested and improved in experiments and thus often have limited power for …

To answer this question, let us ask first: What is a model? A model is a simplified depiction of a part of the real world. Such a depiction is always …

In this course, you will learn how our environmental and energy economic models can be used to answer questions raised by environmental or energy policy. We will show you how …

Thank you for joining this course on modeling in environmental and energy economics. We hope you enjoyed this course as much as we did. Hopefully, this course has provided you …

Let’s shortly look a bit more closer at how to transfer your model into a consistent story. As explained in the last step you can use the four phase structure …