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Carbon Contracts-for-difference: How to De-risk Innovative Investments for a Low-carbon Industry?

The shift to climate neutrality requires new process technologies for energy-intensive industries, such as steel, chemicals, or cement. A variety of technology options exist – but they face the challenges of (i) first-of-kind costs, (ii) higher operation and investment costs, and (iii) insufficient and uncertain carbon prices, which partly stem from political uncertainty. Existing innovation policy ...

The Expansion of Natural Gas Infrastructure Puts Energy Transitions at Risk

Whether additional natural gas infrastructure is needed or would be detrimental to achieving climate protection goals is currently highly controversial. Here we combine five perspectives to argue why expansion of the natural gas infrastructure hinders a renewable energy future and is no bridge technology. We highlight that natural gas is a fossil fuel with a significantly underestimated climate impact ...

Overcoming the Disconnect between Energy System and Climate Modeling

Factors Affecting Rental Prices in the Russian Empire

In this study, we investigate the determinants of rental prices in Russian Empire prior to World War I and the variation of housing rents across cities. For our research, we use statistical data on 1232 cities in 1910. Our analysis shows that the urban rents in imperial Russia were affected by such city characteristics as its population structure, prices for different goods, and the geographical position. ...

The Assessment of Substitution through Event Studies: An Application to Supply-Side Substitution in Berlin’s Rental Market

Extracting Agency and Communion from the Big Five: A Four-Way Competition

Agency and communion are the two fundamental content dimensions in psychology. The two dimensions figure prominently in many psychological realms (personality, social, self, motivational, cross-cultural, etc.). In contemporary research, however, personality is most commonly measured within the Big Five framework. We developed novel agency and communion scales based on the items from the most popular ...

Do Words Hurt More than Actions? The Impact of Trade Tensions on Financial Markets

We use machine learning techniques to quantify trade tensions between the United States and China. Our measure matches well-known events in the US-China trade dispute and is exogenous to the developments on global financial markets. Local projections show that rising trade tensions leave US markets largely unaffected, except for firms that are more exposed to China, while negatively impacting stock ...

Does Green Public Procurement Trigger Environmental Innovations?

Green public procurement has gained high political priority and is argued to be an effective demand-side policy to trigger environmental innovations. However, the empirical evidence on its innovation impact is limited. We construct a novel firm-level dataset to investigate the effect of winning public procurement tenders with additional environmental award criteria on firms’ introduction of environmental ...

Centre-Based Care and Parenting Activities

We examine the relationship between parenting activities and centre-based care using time diary and survey data for mothers in Germany. While mothers using centre-based care spend significantly less time in the presence of their child, we find that differences in the time spent on specific activities such as reading, talking, and playing with the child are relatively small or zero. The pattern of results ...

The Dynamics of Recent Refugees’ Language Acquisition: How Do Their Pathways Compare to Those of Other New Immigrants?

Do the processes underlying destination-language acquisition differ between recently arrived refugees and other new immigrants? Based on a well-established model of language learning according to which language fluency is a function of efficiency, incentives, and exposure, this study addresses general processes of language learning as well as conditions specific to refugees. Longitudinal data on refugees ...