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Renewable Energy Targets and Unintended Storage Cycling: Implications for Energy Modeling

To decarbonize the economy, many governments have set targets for the use of renewable energy sources. These are often formulated as relative shares of electricity demand or supply. Implementing respective constraints in energy models is a surprisingly delicate issue. They may cause a modeling artifact of excessive electricity storage use. We introduce this phenomenon as “unintended storage cycling”, ...

Overcoming the Disconnect between Energy System and Climate Modeling

2nd Workshop on Rent Control

The aim of the workshop is to bring together experts from different countries and different disciplines (economics, history, law, sociology, etc.) whose “common denominator” is their interest in rent control. This event aims to be a forum for discussing rent control experiences around the world. It should also foster a stronger network among scholars, thus facilitating joint research...

The Early Bird Catches the Worm! Setting a Deadline for Online Panel Recruitment Incentives

The literature on the effects of incentives in survey research is vast and covers a diversity of survey modes. The mode of probability-based online panels, however, is still young and so is research into how to best recruit sample units into the panel. This paper sheds light on the effectiveness of a specific type of incentive in this context: a monetary incentive that is paid conditionally upon panel ...

The Productivity Shock in Business Services

In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by SME, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. Similar developments can be observed in several other European economies. Using a German dataset with 700,000 firm-level observations, we analyze this largely undiscovered phenomenon in professional services, the fourth largest sector of the business economy in the EU-15, ...

Sanctions against Russian Oligarchs also Affect Their Companies

In February 2022, the EU Commission announced economic sanctions against Russian oligarchs. The goal was to exert pressure on the Kremlin: initially to stop deploying troops to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and ultimately to end its attack on Ukraine. The present report investigates how these sanctions affect companies headed by Russian oligarchs. The empirical findings show that after sanctions ...

Expectation Management of Policy Leaders: Evidence from COVID-19

This paper studies how the communication of political leaders affects the expectation formation of the public. Specifically, we examine the expectation management of the German government regarding COVID-19-related regulatory measures during the early phase of the pandemic. We elicit beliefs about the duration of these restrictions via a high-frequency survey of individuals, accompanied by an addi-tional ...

Signalling Creditworthiness with Fiscal Austerity

Sovereign borrowers may tighten their fiscal stance in order to signal their creditworthiness to lenders. In a model of sovereign debt with incomplete information, I show that a trustworthy country may reduce its debt beyond the optimal level in order to separate itself from less reliable countries. Since austerity is costly, the gains in the price of debt from separating need to be high enough, as ...

SOEP-IS for new research questions: call for proposals for the 2023 survey

Researchers in Germany and abroad are invited to submit proposals for the next round of the SOEP Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). For those not yet familiar with SOEP-IS, this unique random sample of German households (N = 2,800 households with about 4,000 respondents) offers great potential as a source of household micro-data, particularly for researchers seeking information that is not available in SOEP-Core—for ...

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