External refereed essays

The Role of CO2-EOR for the Development of a CCTS Infrastructure in the North Sea Region: A Techno-Economic Model and Applications

Scenarios of future energy systems attribute an important role to Carbon Capture, Transport, and Storage (CCTS) in achieving emission reductions. Using captured CO2for enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) can improve the economics of the technology. This paper examines the potential for CO2-EOR in the North Sea region. UK oil fieldsare found to account for 47% of the estimated total additional recovery ...

The Integration of Renewable Energies into the German Transmission Grid: A Scenario Comparison

This article presents a quantitative assessment of the need for electricity transmission capacity investments in Germany for 2030. Congestion is analyzed and its possible relief through appropriate grid reinforcements as those described in the Ten Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP) of the European Commission. Congestion is investigated in three scenarios which differ in the location of power resources ...

Determinants of Trade with Solar Energy Technology Components: Evidence on the Porter Hypothesis

Studies analysing renewable energy (RE) market development usually investigate electricity capacity or investment. Characteristics, roles and determinants of trade with RE system components remain blurred. Policies are important in promoting RE utilization and innovation. Yet, their effect on determining exports remains ambiguous. The Porter hypothesis and the lead-market literature argue that environmental ...

Does Euro Area Membership Affect the Relation between GDP Growth and Public Debt?

We analyse the relationship between the debt-to-GDP ratio and real per capita GDP growth for euro area members and a broader set of industrial countries by distinguishing periods of sustainable and non-sustainable debt. Thresholds for debt are theory-driven and depend on macroeconomic conditions. If the nominal interest rate exceeds nominal output growth, primary budget surpluses are required to achieve ...

How Important Is the Family? Evidence from Sibling Correlations in Permanent Earnings in the USA, Germany, and Denmark

This paper is the first to analyze the impact of family background on permanent earnings based on sibling correlations in Germany and to provide a cross-country comparison of Germany, Denmark, and USA. The main findings are that family and community background has a stronger influence on permanent earnings in Germany than in Denmark, and a comparable influence is found in USA. This holds true for both ...

Disentangling Demand and Supply Shocks in the Crude Oil Market: How to Check Sign Restrictions in Structural VARs

Sign restrictions have become increasingly popular for identifying shocks in structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models. So far there are no techniques for validating the shocks identified via such restrictions. Although in an ideal setting the sign restrictions specify shocks of interest, sign restrictions may be invalidated by measurement errors, data adjustments or omitted variables. We model ...

Reducing Confidence Bands for Simulated Impulse Responses

It is emphasized that the shocks in structural vector autoregressions are only identified up to sign and it is pointed out that this feature can result in very misleading confidence intervals for impulse responses if simulation methods such as Bayesian or bootstrap methods are used. The confidence intervals heavily depend on which variable is used for fixing the signs of the responses. In particular, ...

Renewable Electric Energy Integration: Quantifying the Value of Design of Markets for International Transmission Capacity

Integrating large quantities of variable renewable electricity generation remains a political and operational challenge. One of the main obstacles in Europe to installing at least 200 GWs of power from variable renewable sources is how to deal with the insufficient network capacity and the congestion that will result from new flow patterns. We model the current methodology for controlling congestion ...

Self-Esteem across Adulthood: The Role of Resources

It is still not well understood how and why developmental trajectories of self-esteem change, particularly in late life. We investigated the role of resources for self-esteem change across adulthood. In detail, we explored between-person differences in self-esteem levels and change in relation to resources with participants who ranged in age from 17 to 100 years. Study 1 consisted of a cross-sectional ...

Asset Prices, News Shocks, and the Trade Balance

We analyze the relationship between asset prices and the trade balance estimating a Bayesian VAR for a broad set of 38 industrialized and emerging market countries. To derive model-based identifying restrictions, we model asset price shocks as news shocks about future productivity in a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Such shocks are found to exert sizable effects on the trade ...

Feeling Good When Sleeping In? Day-to-Day Associations between Sleep Duration and Affective Well-Being Differ from Youth to Old Age

The current study investigated how night-to-night variations in sleep duration relate to affective well-being the next morning as well as how the relationship varies for people of different ages. Using an Experience Sampling approach, 397 participants aged 12 to 88 years reported their sleep duration and their momentary affect on 9 mornings, on average. Associations between sleep duration during the ...

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)

Building the Minimum Wage: The Distributional Impact of Germany's First Sectoral Minimum Wage on Wages and Hours across Different Wage Bargaining Regimes

The first minimum wage in Germany was introduced in 1997 for blue-collar workers in sub-sectors of the construction industry. In the setting of a natural experiment, blue-collar workers in neighboring 4-digit industries and white-collar workers are used as control groups for differences-in-differences-in-differences estimation based on linked employer-employee data. Estimation results reveal a sizable ...

The Impact of Upfront Payments on Assortment Decisions in Retailing

There is a contentious debate about the exclusionary effects of upfront payments to be made by manufacturers to place their products on retailers' shelves. Analyzing a two-stage bargaining process with one downstream retailer and a pool of upstream manufacturers, we find that upfront payments lead to a smaller assortment if the retailer's bargaining power is high enough and the suppliers' products ...

SOEP 2012: The 10th International Socio-Economic Panel User Conference: Editorial

Geschlechtsspezifische Verdienstunterschiede bei Führungskräften und sonstigen Angestellten in Deutschland: welche Relevanz hat der Frauenanteil im Beruf?

Der Beitrag vergleicht den Effekt der Geschlechterzusammensetzung im Beruf auf die Verdienstunterschiede von Frauen und Männern zwischen Führungspositionen und Nicht Führungspositionen in der Privatwirtschaft auf der Basis von Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP). Anhand gängiger theoretischer Ansätze wird die Hypothese entwickelt, dass in Führungspositionen die Qualifikationsanforderungen und ...

Longevity, Life-Cycle Behavior and Pension Reform

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this question, we use micro data to estimate a structural life-cycle model of individuals' employment, retirement and consumption decisions. We calculate that, in the case of Germany, an increase of 3.76 years in the pension age thresholds or a cut of 26.8% in the per-year value ...

Personality Characteristics and the Decisions to Become and Stay Self-Employed

Based on a large, representative German household panel, we investigate to what extent the personality of individuals influences the entry decision into and the exit decision from self-employment. We reveal that some traits, such as openness to experience, extraversion, and risk tolerance affect entry, but different ones, such as agreeableness or different parameter values of risk tolerance, affect ...

Das Elterngeld und seine Wirkungen auf das Haushaltseinkommen junger Familien und die Erwerbstätigkeit von Müttern

Mit der Einführung des Elterngeldes im Jahr 2007 beabsichtigte die Bundesregierung die Bedingungen für Familien mit jungen Kindern zu verbessern. Die neue familienpolitische Leistung hatte mehrere Ziele, von denen in diesem Beitrag drei zentrale untersucht werden: Zum Ersten sollte für Eltern in der Frühphase der Elternschaft ein Schonraum geschaffen werden. Zum Zweiten ist es ein erklärtes Ziel des ...

Carbon Tariffs for Financing Clean Development

In order to address carbon leakage and preserve the competitiveness of domestic industries, some industrialized Annex I countries have proposed to implement carbon tariffs. These tariffs would be levied on energy-intensive imports from developing non-Annex I countries that have not agreed to binding emissions reductions. This action could have detrimental welfare impacts, especially on those developing ...