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Investing in Europe’s green and digital future

The European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) – the financial pillar of the Investment Plan for Europe – has been one of the good news stories to emerge in a decade of economic uncertainty. Launched by the Juncker Commission and the EIB Group in 2014, it has gone well beyond its target of €500 billion in mobilised investments. In the meantime, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to the biggest...

Comparing Coal Phase-Out Pathways: The United Kingdom’s and Germany’s Diverging Transitions

Political decisions and trends regarding coal use for electricity generation developed differently in the UK and Germany, despite being subject to relatively similar climate protection targets and general political and economic conditions. The UK agreed on a coal phase-out by 2024. In Germany, a law schedules a coal phase-out by 2038 at the latest. This paper investigates reasons for the different ...

Great Green Transition and Finance

European governments are struggling to regain economic strength in the coronavirus pandemic as in many countries the number of new infections seems to gradually subside. Growth rates deep in the red call for a reconstruction programme when the crisis is finally manageable and economic activity can resume. Amidst this, there are again infl uential groups that claim “this is not the time to insist on strict ...

Transmission Network Investment Using Incentive Regulation: A Disjunctive Programming Approach

A well-planned electric transmission infrastructure is the foundation of a reliable and efficient power system, especially in the presence of large scale renewable generation. However, the current electricity market designs lack incentive mechanisms which can guarantee optimal transmission investments and ensure reliable integration of renewable generation such as wind. This paper first proposes a ...

Foreign Exchange Intervention: A New Database

We construct a novel database of monthly foreign exchange interventions for 49 countries over up to 22 years. We build on a text classification approach that extracts information about interventions from news articles and calibrate our procedure to data about actual interventions. Our new dataset allows us to document stylized facts about the use of foreign exchange interventions for countries that ...

Early retirement of employees in demanding jobs: evidence from a German pension reform

Workers in demanding jobs may be particularly negatively affected by an increasing statutory retirement age. We exploit a pension reform that raised the early retirement age of women from 60 to 63 years in Germany. Based on a large administrative social security data set we exploit the quasi-natural experiment using a regression-discontinuity approach. We find the same relative employment...

School Types: Evidence on the relative effectiveness of different school arrangements

The Relationship between Financial Literacy and Financial Inclusion

About two billion people in the world do not own a financial account and there are many more who use financial services only occasionally. In the past, initiatives which address these problems of financial exclusion focused on the supply side of financial markets, in particular by increasing the branch network of banks and by offering cheap bank products. While this had the desired effect, recent ...

Emotions and Risk Attitudes

Previous work has shown that preferences are not always stable across time, but surprisingly little is known about the reasons for this instability. I examine whether variation in people’s emotions over time predicts changes in risk attitudes. Using a large panel data set, I identify happiness, anger, and fear as significant correlates of within-person changes in risk attitudes. Robustness checks indicate ...

The Graduate Center is mourning Nedim Okan’s death

Nedim Okan died on May 24, 2021, in Istanbul at the age of 31. Nedim was a doctoral student in the 2019 cohort at the BSE. After successfully completing his coursework at the DIW GC, he joined the WZB for his research phase. We are all overwhelmed by this terrible loss. Our thoughts are with his wife, his family and his friends. If you would like to have a personal conversation, you can contact the ...