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The single bidding zone leads to grid congestion and costs – local market prices balance supply and demand regionally

Local Market Prices Can Reduce Electricity Costs

With the liberalization of the electricity markets in 1998, Germany opted for a single, nationwide wholesale price. Regional differences in supply and demand are not taken into account. In the event of grid congestion, electricity generators are paid to adjust their output. This leads to rising costs, an overestimation of grid expansion requirements and increased bureaucracy. Reforms are therefore ...

Divorce as Liberation from Violence: The Role of Legal Protection and Women’s Shelters

Does increased legal infrastructure empower victims to leave abusive relationships? Structural barriers often prevent victims of intimate partner violence from seeking help, with two-thirds of female victims in Europe neither reporting incidents nor accessing support. I study Germany’s 2002 Act on Protection against Violence, which introduced residence bans in shared households and temporarily awarded ...

Within-Nation Variation in War Exposure and Psychological and Physical Adjustment

Extensive evidence suggests that war-related trauma negatively affects health, yet its long-term and transgenerational effects on psychological and physical adjustment remain poorly understood. This study examines whether individuals who experienced greater war exposure in early childhood—specifically variation in bombardment intensity across German municipalities during the Second World War—show lower, ...

Intermittency and Market Power

Abstract: Electricity markets are increasingly shaped by uncertainty in residual demand due to renewable expansion. This weakens the disciplining role of forward markets and amplifies the potential for market power in spot pricing. Understanding this mechanism is essential for informed market design in the context of growing intermittency and structural transformation of energy systems.

Price Dynamics and Capacity Mechanisms in a Fully Renewable Power System: A Model-based Stochastic Analysis

This work presents a multi-stage stochastic optimization model to analyze price dynamics and reliability of supply in a 100% renewable power system. The stochastic framework captures uncertainty arising from the intermittency of weather-dependent renewable energy sources and compares three market design options for a future fully renewable German electricity market: an energy-only market without...

The "Dirty Self-Hedge": A Speedbump on the Way to Decarbonizing Industry?

This paper identifies a risk-hedging mechanism we coin the "dirty self-hedge" and analyzes how it affects financing costs of green industrial investments. The dirty self-hedge occurs in basic materials production when exclusively conventional, emission-intensive producers can pass on input price shocks to final product prices. They thus have a natural hedge for their profit margins against input...

Monetary and Fiscal Interactions

Public debt has reached historically high levels in many advanced economies and continues to grow at an unprecedented pace. This development has brought questions of fiscal sustainability, macroeconomic stability, and the appropriate conduct of monetary and fiscal policy to the forefront of policy debates worldwide. This five-lecture course investigates the mechanisms and conditions under which...

Learn to use the SOEP over lunch

The German Socio-Economic Panel Study is a representative panel study for the German population, collecting data on a broad variety of topics of everyday life, including general well-being, household composition, educational aspirations and educational status, income and occupational biographies, leisure time activities, housing, health, political orientation and more. With its long-running panel...

SOEPcampus@DIW Berlin 2026

On October 6 and 7, 2026, we are organizing a two-day workshop on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at DIW Berlin. In addition to presentations on the composition, data structure, sampling design, and weighting strategy, hands-on sessions will offer a practical approach to the data and its potential. The workshop is aimed at researchers at all qualification levels who want to work with SOEP data in...