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100% Renewable Energy Scenarios for North America: Spatial Distribution and Network Constraints

The urgency to combat climate change and the widely distributed, increasingly competitive renewable resources in North America are strong arguments to explore scenarios for a renewable energy supply in the region. While the current power system of North America is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, namely natural gas, coal and oil, and some nuclear power plants, some current policies at the state level, ...

Decarbonisation of Energy: Determining a Robust Mix of Energy Carriers for a Carbon-Neutral EU

Mindestlohn und Arbeitsintensität: Evidenz aus Deutschland

2015 wurde nach jahrelangen und zum Teil heftigen politischen Diskussionender gesetzliche Mindestlohn in Deutschland eingeführt. Seitens der Gegner undSkeptiker dieser Reform wurden vielfältige negative Folgen eines gesetzlichenMindestlohns antizipiert. So wurde unter anderem argumentiert, dass einMindestlohn und dessen geplante regelmäßige Anpassung zu einer gesteigertenArbeitsintensität in den Mindestlohnbereichen ...

Highway Conditions and Insufficient Maintenance in Germany: A Threat for Economic Growth?

We analyse the impact of transportation infrastructure capital and its maintenance status on regionaleconomic production, exploiting panel data on the German county level (N = 401) between 2007 and2016 in a spatial translog production function. Various SLX and SDEM models are estimated usingFGLS and GMM estimators accounting for endogeneity. We find a positive impact of the transportinfrastructure ...

Firms in (Green) Public Procurement: Financial Strength Indicators’ Impact on Contract Awards and Its Repercussion on Financial Strength

We examine whether the financial strength of companies, in particular, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) is causally linked to the award of a public procurement contract (PP), especially in the environmentally friendly “green” area (GPP). For this purpose, we build a combined procurement company data set from the Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) and the SME database AMADEUS, which includes ten ...

The Effects of an Increase in the Retirement Age on Health: Evidence from Administrative Data

This study analyzes the causal effect of an increase in the retirement age on health. We exploit a sizable cohort-specific pension reform for women using two complementary empirical approaches - a Regression Discontinuity Design and a Difference-in- Differences approach. The analysis is based on official records covering all individuals insured by the public health system in Germany and including all ...

The Term Structure of Currency Futures' Risk Premia

The use of futures instead of forwards exchange contracts completes the maturity spectrum of the correlation between spot yields and the premium. We find that the forward premium puzzle appears to be a precrisis phenomenon and is only observed for maturities longer than about 1 month. Differences in the exposure to risk help to explain cross-sectional spreads in currency excess returns. However, this ...

In a World with Many Targets, One-Dimensional Target Indicators Will Always Be Bypassed

It is striking that economists in particular firmly believe in the benefits of rule-binding, even though this belief runs counter to the standard assumption of economic theory that we humans are self-interested and therefore extremely resourceful when it comes to circumventing inconvenient government regulations, e.g. taxes. In Public Choice Theory, politicians are even assumed to have nothing but ...

Sociohistorical Change in Urban Older Adults’ Perceived Speed of Time and Time Pressure

ObjectivesPerceptions of time are shaped by sociohistorical factors. Specifically, economic growth and modernization often engender a sense of acceleration. Research has primarily focused on one time perception dimension (perceived time pressure) in one subpopulation (working-age adults), but it is not clear whether historical changes extend to other dimensions (e.g., perceived speed of time) and other ...

Merger Efficiency Gains: Evidence from a Large Transport Merger in France

Many industries are seeing an increase in concentration, leading to a discussion on the effectiveness of horizontal merger enforcement. The policy debate shows that one of the key arguments put forward when supporting potential mergers is the possibility of realization of merger efficiency gains, specifically in the transport industry. Yet, there exists little empirical evidence on the actual effects ...