Fossil Resources and Climate Change – The Green Paradox and Resource Market Power Revisited in General Equilibrium

This dissertation was written by Johannes Pfeiffer while he was working with the ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in November 2016 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the department of economics of the University Regensburg in December 2016. The thesis studies unintended intertemporal reactions of fossil resource supply to climate policies, which often are subsumed under the notion of the green paradox, while taking into account the interrelationship between the resource and the capital market in a general equilibrium framework. Its specific contributions derive from three observations: First, resource markets, in particular of oil and natural gas, are often considered as not being truly competitive. Second, resource-rich countries invest in the international capital market and by now often hold substantial assets, for example in so-called sovereign wealth funds. Third, “green” energy technologies such as renewable energies mostly use physical capital to substitute fossil resources in energy generation, while generally capital and fossil resources are still seen as highly complementary in production. Overall, the thesis illustrates that general equilibrium approaches, particularly when accounting for these observations, can substantially alter the supply-side effects of climate policies.