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European Energy and Climate Policy Requires Ambitious Targets for 2030

In January 2014, the European Commission proposed a framework for its climate and energy policy up to 2030. It includes targets for reducing greenhouse gases and using renewable energies, but no specific targets for increasing energy efficiency. By 2030, greenhouse gas emissions are to be reduced by 40 percent over 1990 figures. Another element of the proposal is the introduction of a market stability ...

Nuclear Power: Phase-Out Model Yet to Address Final Disposal Issue

Three years after the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima one observes a certain momentum with regard to lifetime extensions as well as some interest in new building ofnuclear power plants. Advocates of nuclear power argue in term of low-cost electricity generation, a secure supply as well as a contribution against climate change. The Reference Scenario of the European Commission - which sets the agenda ...

Is There Still a Case for Merchant Interconnectors? Insights from an Analysis of Welfare and Distributional Aspects of Options for Network Expansion in the Baltic Sea Region

Despite the ongoing appetite of financial investors for merchant investments into the European electricity network, the EC is reluctant to approve such undertakings, thus implicitly favoring regulated investments. Based on a two-level model, we analyze the impact of profit-maximizing merchant transmission investment as compared to welfare-maximizing regulated transmission investment. We apply the model ...

Sectoral Wage Development: The Key to Greater Wage Increases Lies in Manufacturing

In the past decade, wages in Germany have risen more slowly than economic performance. Year on year, average wages remained approximately 0.3 percent behind what was available in redistribution volume, given the development of production. Although there are also sectors with low wages, in which wage increases were insufficient according to this benchmark--such as the hospitality industry, construction, ...

Functional Restructuring in Manufacturing: Increasing Importance of Production-Related Services

There are fewer and fewer people employed in the German manufacturing sector. Between 1999 and 2013, the number of people working in the industry fell from 7.7 million to 7.3 million. However, not all areas have been equally affected by the decline, rather, there has been a functional restructuring within the industry: while fewer people are being employed in production, employment in many production-related ...

Uncertainty of Macroeconomic Forecasters and the Prediction of Stock Market Bubbles

We assess the contribution of macroeconomic uncertainty — approximated by the dispersion of the real GDP survey forecasts — to the ex post and ex ante prediction of stock price bubbles. For a panel of six OECD economies covering 24 years, two alternative binary chronologies of bubble periods are determined and subjected to panel logit regressions conditioning on macroeconomic indicators and expectation ...

A Lower Carbon Strategy for the Electricity Sector of Kazakhstan to 2030/50: Scenarios for Generation and Network Development ; Technical Report

The Effect of Local Crime on Well-Being: Evidence for Germany

This paper investigates the effect of local crime on well-being in Germany, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and a novel data set constructed from official police crime statistics, covering both counties and urban districts for the time period between 1994 and 2012. We find that local area crime has a significantly negative impact on life satisfaction, makes residents worry more ...

Study on the investment behavior of electricity and gas network operators as part of the evaluation report in accordance with § 33 para. 1 ARegV

Study on the investment behavior of electricity and gas network operators as part of the evaluation report in accordance with § 33 para. 1 ARegV (in German only)

Extreme Weather Events and Child Height: Evidence from Mongolia

We provide new evidence on the impact of one severe weather shock on child height in Mongolia. Our focus is on the extremely harsh winter – locally referred to as dzud – of 2009/10, which caused more than 23 percent of the national livestock to perish. This resulted in a food insecurity situation for many Mongolian households. Our analysis identifies causal effects by exploiting exogenous variation ...