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Thermal Retrofitting of Worst Performing Buildings Mitigates Risk of High Heating Costs

The pace of thermal retrofit of buildings in Germany remains slow. A Worst-First approach, prioritizing the retrofit of inefficient buildings, would address energy- and social policy objectives and deliver economic and climate benefits. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) show how such an approach would protect especially low-income households often living in very inefficient buildings ...

Sustainable Finance Taxonomies: Enabling the Transition towards Net Zero? A Transition Score for International Frameworks

A plethora of sustainable finance taxonomies are emerging worldwide to support shifting trillions for climate action. Employing a qualitative research approach, we use document analysis to assess 26 sustainable finance taxonomy frameworks worldwide that are in the developing phase or have been published and/or adopted. Based on literature and data we build a transition score (TS) to evaluate the framework’s ...

What are the distributional advantages of retrofitting?

Long-Run Consequences of Informal Elderly Care and Implications of Public Long-Term Care Insurance

We estimate a dynamic structural model of labor supply, retirement, and informal caregiving to study short and long-term costs of informal caregiving in Germany. Incorporating labor market frictions and the German tax and benefit system, we find that in the absence of Germany’s public long-term insurance scheme, informal elderly care has adverse and persistent effects on labor market outcomes and, ...

The obstinacy of gender stereotypes. Evidence from the Found-in-Translation Task

The pursuit of science (especially exact sciences) is commonly associated with the male gender. This might have a lot of negative consequences, including discrimination and underrepresentation of female researchers at academia. We conduct two experiments with a series of conditions that make it gradually easier to avoid misattribution of gender of a female scholar. In a novel Found-in-Translation...

Gender differences and stereotypes in newspaper coverage of company board members

I present first descriptive evidence on gender differences and stereotypes in newspaper coverage of company board members in Germany through quantitative text analysis. Regularized regression shows that family-related terms are predictive of an article being about a woman. An association of women with family and men with careers is also shown in dictionary-based analyses using the term frequency...

Career Decisions over the Life-cycle: The Impact of Social Insurance Policies

Work-limiting disabilities pose a significant risk to the earnings potential and welfare of older workers. While coverage of public disability insurance (DI) systems is almost universal, the risk of becoming dependent on DI varies across occupations. In this paper, I study the value of public DI across different occupations using data from administrative social security records in Germany. I...

Electricity Markets Stabilized Following the Energy Crisis; 80 Percent Renewable Energy and Coal Phase-out by 2030 Are Possible

The German electricity market has recovered well from the 2022 energy crisis. Policymakers should now redirect the focus of energy policy to further expanding renewable energy sources. The year 2023 showed that the German electricity supply remained secure following the shutdown of nuclear power plants. It is possible, affordable, and plausible in light of climate policy to cover 80 percent of electricity ...

Climate dividends and public support for carbon pricing

With the increasing urgency to address climate change, understanding public sentiment is crucial for designing effective and socially acceptable environmental policies. Despite the existence of effective tools for the green transition, a significant obstacle for policymakers lies in the lack of public support, hindering their ability to utilize these tools effectively. One tool that has been...

What could the electricity mix look like in 2030?