Increasing the use of heat pumps is an important measure for reducing carbon emissions in the heating sector as well as natural gas imports. This report uses an electricity sector model to investigate the effects of an accelerated expansion of the heat pump stock on the German electricity sector in 2030. Adding around six million heat pumps would increase electricity demand by nine percent in 2030; ...
Firms with superior productivity, labeled superstar firms, are argued to be the link between rising concentration and the fall of the aggregate labor share in the US. This analysis confirms that similar evidence is found within the European context: the market share and firm size increase, whereas the labor share decreases with productivity. One of the much discussed mechanisms behind this development ...
Inflation has been growing considerably since the middle of 2021, with rising energy prices driving the increase in particular. Since the end of February 2022, the trend has also been exacerbated by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. To keep prices stable, the European Central Bank must rein in its accommodative monetary policy. However, would doing so—by enacting an interest rate increase, for ...
This is the first paper to examine experimentally effects of information provision on beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns of postgraduate education, enrolment intentions and realized enrolment. We find that our treatment causally affects beliefs measured six months after treatment. The effects on beliefs differ by gender and academic background, and we find that stated enrolment intentions ...
Very wealthy people influence political and societal processes by wielding their economic power through foundations, lobbying groups, media campaigns, as investors and employers. Because personality shapes goals, attitudes, and behaviour, it is important to understand the personality traits that characterize the rich. We used representative survey data to construct two large samples, one from the general ...
The debate about making investments and the financial sector more sustainable often focuses on a narrow distinction between "green" and "brown" assets that does not match the situation in the real economy, writes Franziska Schütze from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). The sustainable finance expert says journalists need to read between the lines and make the many colours visible to ...
