The deployment of a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 will be central to lifting containment measures. In a bid to speed up vaccine deployment, governments are entering into ‘Advance Purchase Agreements’ (APAs) with vaccine companies to secure access to vaccine doses. We document and compare the vaccine procurement strategies of the US and the EU. Most notably, we find that both...
On 2 June 2020 DG Competition of the European Commission published several support studies on the retrospective evaluation of State aid rules. This “Fitness check” will serve as a basis for future Commission’s decisions about whether to further prolong or update the rules expiring in 2020. The consortium of DIW Berlin, Lear, Sheppard Mullin and UEA Consulting under the leadership ...
Already after the financial crisis in 2008/2009 there was a debate on whether elements aiming at sustainable development can be part of the stimulus packages and support the recovery of the economy. Despite the instinct of policy makers to prioritise battle-tested policies during a crisis, significant levels and different types of climate-friendly components were integrated in the 2009 stimulus...
This event takes place online via Zoom. Abstract: While the coronavirus spreads around the world, governments are attempting to reduce contagion rates at the expense of negative economic effects. Market expectations have plummeted, foreshadowing the risk of a global economic crisis and mass unemployment. Governments provide huge financial aid programmes to mitigate the expected economic...
Abstract: An increasing body of empirical evidence has documented trends to risen concentration, profits, markups, and market power in many industries across the world since the 1980s. Several factors – such as globalisation, digitisation, the increased role of intangible assets and sunk costs, as well as M&A activity and the (under)enforcement of merger control– have been...
We examine whether a disclosure mandate for greenhouse gas emissions creates stakeholder pressure for firms to subsequently reduce their emissions. For UK-incorporated listed firms such a mandate was adopted in 2013. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that firms affected by the mandate reduced their emissions – depending on the specification – by an incremental 14-18% relative to a control ...
Understanding the causes of the slowdown in aggregate productivity growth is key to maintaining the competitiveness of advanced economies and ensuring long-term economic prosperity. This paper is the first to provide evidence that investment in Knowledge-Based Capital (KBC), despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the ...
Industrial demand response can play an important part in balancing the intermittent production from a growing share of renewable energies in electricity markets. This paper analyses the role of aggregators – intermediaries between participants and the electricity market – in facilitating industrial demand response. Based on the results from semi-structured interviews with German demand response aggregators, ...
Incentives for industrial loads to provide demand response on day-ahead and reserve markets are affected both by network tariffs, as well as regulations on the provision of flexibility in different markets. This paper uses a numerical model of the chlor-alkali process with a storable intermediate good to investigate how these factors affect the provision of demand response in these markets. We also ...
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