Existing long-term energy and climate scenarios are typically a rather simple extrapolation of past trends. Both qualitative and quantitative outlooks co-exist, but they often focus narrowly on individual perspectives, which is opposed to the interlinked and complex nature of energy and climate....

This paper analyzes optimal grading in a world that focuses on top grades. Students choose an effort level, their performance is graded, and their grade correlates with their future income. Ex-ante, the policy maker chooses the optimal coarseness of the grading scale to maximize student welfare....

We address the question of whether media influences occupational choices. To theoretically examine media effects, we construct a dynamic Bayesian occupational choice model with sequential decisions under ambiguity due to imperfect information. We show that sufficiently intensive positive media...

We investigate the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions (ZVS) in medicine and related subjects. This mechanism consists of three procedures based on final grades from school (Abiturbestenverfahren, Auswahlverfahren der Hochschulen) and on waiting...

This paper proposes a simultaneous-equation approach to the estimation of the contribution of transport infrastructure accumulation to regional growth. We model explicitly the political-economy process driving infrastructure investments; in doing so, we eliminate a potential source of bias in...

Soft budget constraints (SBCs) are a persistent feature of transition economies and have been blamed for i.a. a lack of fiscal consolidation and sluggish growth. EU eastward enlargement has - among other things - been conditioned on tackling SBCs. This paper analyzes such outside conditionality...

We analyze the ECB Governing Council's voting procedures. The literature has by now discussed numerous aspects of the rotation model but does not account for many institutional aspects of the voting procedure of the GC. Using the randomization scheme based on the multilinear extension (MLE) of...

The increasing scale and dynamics of the global market for renewable energy technologies has often resulted in unexpected high deployment volumes in EU Member States. These deployment peaks were particularly strong for solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies in countries using feed-in tariff...

As from a political economy perspective, politicians often fail to implement structural reforms, we investigate if the resistance to reform is based on the differences in the risk preferences of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. Based on the empirical results of a survey of the population in...

The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the...