LAUSR

The Energy Transition is underway. An increasing number of countries—with Europe, and now the USA, leading the way—have committed to drastically reducing their emissions during the coming decades. The European Green Deal, that was announced in Madrid in December 2019 just before the COVID-19 hit our economies, was the first of a series of commitments to reach carbon neutrality no later than 2050. The European Recovery and Resilience Plan, with its green and digital conditionality, has backed this ambition by providing funds which will accelerate the achievement of this goal. All sectors of the economy—with no exception—will be impacted by this challenge: power, transportation, construction or agriculture, to name just a few, will go through profound structural changes which will bring in opportunities, but also risks and challenges. Likewise, the Energy Transition will have deep socio-economic implications, which will broadly depend on the set of regulatory and tax policies that will be put in place. Economics has to play a key role in the Energy Transition. It has to guide policymaking in this area by identifying the obstacles that may hamper or delay the Energy Transition. It also has to provide guidance on how best to design policies that contribute to reducing the costs of the Energy Transition, while mitigating any adverse distributional implications. Last, but not least, it has to make use of its quantitative toolkit to measure the impacts that the Energy Transition will have on our economies and societies. The overarching objective of decarbonizing all sectors of the economy calls researchers in this area to multiply their efforts over the next few years. This was indeed the guiding motivation of the Journal of the Spanish Economic AssociationSERIEs for launching a Special Issue on the Economics of the Energy Transition. The topics that were proposed in the call for papers reflected the broad diversity of research questions and challenges ahead: from the design and effects of climate mitigation policies to the role of companies in the Energy Transition, from the thorough analysis of the distributional impacts of the Energy Transition to its impacts in terms of