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From Distribution Networks to Smart Distribution Systems: Rethinking the Regulation of European Electricity DSOs

Distributed energy resources allow for new business models that have the potential to substantially change today's power system functioning paradigm. In particular, these changes pose challenges for distribution system operators (DSOs) and their regulation alike. This article sheds light on missing aspects in current regulation, recognizing DSOs as regulated monopolies, but also as key players along ...

The EU Internal Electricity Market: Done Forever?

Taking a quarter-century to build Europe's internal market for electricity may seem an incredibly long journey. The aim of achieving a Europe-wide market might be reached, but it has involved – and continues to involve – a process subject to many adverse dynamics. The EU internal market may derail greatly in the coming years from the effects of a massive push for renewables, as well as a growing decentralization ...

The Economic Effects of a Central Bank Reacting to House Price Inflation

What are the economic effects of a central bank that takes the evolution of house prices into account? In an attempt to answer this question, we use a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with a housing sector to explore the economic impacts of a central bank reacting to house price inflation. We examine this in the context of two different shocks that are associated with two ...

Risks and Returns to Educational Fields: A Financial Asset Approach to Vocational and Academic Education

Applying a financial assets approach, we analyze the returns and earnings risk of investments into different types of human capital. Even though the returns from investing in human capital are extensively studied, little is known about the properties of the returns to different types of human capital within a given educational path. Using information from the German Micro Census, we estimate the risk ...

An Empirical Assessment of the 2004 EU Merger Policy Reform

We evaluate the economic impact of the change in European merger legislation in 2004 and propose a general framework focusing on four different policy dimensions: predictability, decision errors, reversion of anti-competitive rents and deterrence. We find that after the reform, the predictability and the accuracy of decisions have improved. Yet, the policy shift away from prohibitions, which entail ...

Funding Self-Employment: The Role of Consumer Credit

This article investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans - in particular, instalment loans and overdrafts - to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and nonfinancial household variables, we show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts significantly more often than employee households. When analysing the correlation between consumer loan ...

Regional Entrepreneurial Opportunities in the Biotech Industry: Exploring the Transition from Award-Winning Nascent Entrepreneurs to Real Start-Ups

Knowledge of factors that determine the transition from nascent entrepreneurship to real entrepreneurship is of major importance for policies aiming to stimulate start-ups effectively. Scholars have concentrated mainly on person-specific factors to explain transition probabilities, and environmental characteristics have been relatively neglected. Given that entrepreneurship is a strongly localized ...

Start-up Competitions as an Instrument of Entrepreneurship Policy: The German Experience

The number of aspiring entrepreneurs in high-tech industries who successfully complete the transition from a nascent start-up project towards an operational new venture is comparatively low in Germany. Since the mid-1990s, policy-makers have initiated numerous start-up competitions (SUCs or business plan competitions) to facilitate this important step in the venture creation process. SUCs have two ...

Daten für die epidemiologische Altersforschung: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen vorhandener Datensätze ; Ergebnisse des 2. Workshops der Arbeitsgruppe Epidemiologie des Alterns der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Epidemiologie (DGEpi)

An Early Warning System to Predict Speculative House Price Bubbles

In this paper, the authors construct country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1-2009:Q4. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental approach and a filter approach. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one which provides the highest concordance between these two techniques. In addition, the authors suggest ...