Hertie School Research Repository
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Time to go beyond the meta-debate on EU strategic autonomy in defence
No full textEU member states have been debating the notion of European strategic
autonomy in the field of defence for decades. The election of
US President Donald Trump in 2016 revived this debate and his administration’s negative attitude towards EU defence cooperation initiatives rendered it highly emotive. With Joe Biden’s victory, the debate is apparently ready to enter the next stage. In this policy brief, I argue that a Biden administration represents an opportunity to go beyond terminological debates onto two more substantial questions that represent two sides of the same coin: how can Europeans
shape a more balanced transatlantic security and defence agenda
and how can they defend their own security interests
Variable renewables and demand flexibility: Day-ahead versus intraday valuation
No full textThis chapter discusses trading in the day-ahead and intraday electricity markets, first in general and then from the perspectives of renewable power generators and demand response, respectively. This includes an overview of the relevant literature, a theoretical framework, and illustrative quantitative examples. The uncertainty of renewable electricity supply drives price volatility, especially in the intraday market, and leads to balancing cost for renewables, which can be optimized through forecasting and trading. The increased intraday price volatility can be exploited and moderated by demand response, which thereby helps to balance the uncertainty of renewables
Culture, the Arts and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Five Cultural Capitals in Search of Solutions
No full textProlonged restrictions on public life and the closure of many cultural activities during the COVID-19 pandemic affected urban cultural ecosystems profoundly. Cities worldwide responded to this challenge with a variety of policy measures. Yet how do the cultural policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic compare across major cultural capitals, and what have been the experiences so far? Which cultural policy developments and frameworks helped or hindered their responses? How did the various governance arrangements affect cultural policy agendas and strategies during the crisis? In this study, we review the cultural policy responses of Berlin, London, New York, Paris and Toronto during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of their respective governance capacities. Specifically, we seek to identify initial insights and lessons learned for more effective and resilient urban cultural policies in future
The Aftermath of the Laval Quartet: Emancipating labour (law) from the rationality of the internal market in the field of posting
No full textThe Laval Quartet rulings of the CJEU have become an indispensable reference in every discussion on the social dimension of the European integration process over the past decade. Becoming a synonym for the subordination of labour rights and social goals to market freedoms, the rulings have raised different questions, the most pressing one being about the relationship between the economic and the social sphere of the EU as an emerging polity. The dissertation enquires into the question to what extent that relationship has been reconfigured in the aftermath of the Quartet rulings.
Starting with the rulings themselves through a law in context approach, the dissertation studied a segment of the aftermath in the period following the rulings (2008-2019). While the aftermath has played out at various levels of EU’s multi-level governance structure, this study focuses on the supranational macro-level, examining the development of the subsequent CJEU case law and the EU-level political responses.
The thesis makes the argument that due to the countermovement that the rulings have quickly triggered at EU and Member State level, a political struggle over the social in the EU has emerged, demonstrating the difficulty of conceiving of the EU as a common social space in conditions of diversity, a strong core-periphery division and governance structures dominated by market rationality.
Particularly the developments in the field of posting of workers, starting with the Quartet and ending with the Revised Posted Workers Directive, reveal three important insights for the integration process more broadly. First, the existing material inequality and differences in economic development among Member States in enlarged EU, of which the Quartet was an early symptom, have buttressed the European regulatory space as a space of conflict between the core and the peripheries. Second, resolving core-periphery conflicts has distributional consequences, which are particularly visible in the context of labour and social questions. Resolving such conflicts requires an EU common conception of (social) justice, which appears particularly difficult to conceive of in the core-periphery constellation. Third, progressive social solutions mostly remain foreclosed, as in both cases, at the Court as well as in the political realm, these are mostly contested within a framework dominated by market rationality
Financial Integration and Regulation: Essays in Macroeconomics
No full textThis thesis consists of three chapters investigating the interactions between the financial and real sector. It provides new evidence on (i) the correlation between portfolio investment integration and business cycle synchronization, (ii) financial regulation and how it is driven by the business cycle, and (iii) electoral incentives influencing financial regulators.
Chapter 1 analyses the correlation between cross-border portfolio investment integration and business cycle synchronization. Using data on 29 advanced economies’ cross-border financial asset holdings, it shows that portfolio investment integration correlates positively with business cycle synchronization when faced with idiosyncratic shocks. However, it correlates negatively when faced with common or global shocks.
Chapter 2, coauthored with Gonçalo Pina, employs a text-mining approach to build a new dataset on regulatory actions against the US financial advisor industry. Employing a Bartik shift-share instrument, it provides causal evidence that regulatory actions are driven by the business cycle.
Chapter 3, coauthored with Gonçalo Pina, discusses the political economy of regulatory actions against the US financial advisor industry. It shows that regulators consistently delay punishment against firms prior to gubernatorial elections
Navigating Motivation: A Semantic and Subjective Atlas of 7 Motives
No full textResearch from psychology, neurobiology and behavioral economics indicates that a binary view of motivation, based on approach and avoidance, may be too reductive. Instead, a literature review suggests that at least seven distinct motives are likely to affect human decisions: “consumption/resource seeking,” “care,” “affiliation,” “achievement,” “status-power,” “threat approach” (or anger), and “threat avoidance” (or fear). To explore the conceptual distinctness and relatedness of these motives, we conducted a semantic categorization task. Here, participants were to assign provided words to one of the motives. By applying principal component analysis to the categorization assignments we represent the semantic inter-relations of these motives on a two-dimensional space, a “semantic atlas.” This atlas suggests that, while care and affiliation are conceptually close, affiliation is closer to threat avoidance (or fear); opposite to these motives we find achievement, consumption and power, with the latter lying closer to threat approach (or anger). In a second study, we asked participants to rate how well the motive-specific words obtained in the first study described their currently experienced feelings. We find that semantically close motives are also more likely to be experienced together, that is, we replicate most of the semantic relations in the “subjective atlas.” We discuss our findings in comparison to other multi-dimensional models of motivation, which show clear similarities. In addition to these motivational atlases, we provide a database of motive-specific words, together with the valence and arousal scores. These can be used for future research on the influence of motives on decision making
Five takeaways from the German “Corona Presidency”
No full textOn 31 December 2020, Germany’s rotating EU Council presidency will come to an end after a particularly difficult term. Corona burst upon an already crowded policy agenda, including the negotiation of the EU’s next seven-year budget, rule of law conditionality and the
finalization of the Brexit negotiations. On top of a packed agenda, the German presidency faced considerable institutional and corona-related constraints. In this Policy Brief, Nicole Koenig and Thu Nguyen look back at the German presidency and develop five key takeaways for the upcoming corona presidencies, notably Portugal (first half of 2021) and Slovenia (second half). The German presidency has shown that they should prepare for more corona crisis
management,internal divisions and unexpected crises
Zivilgesellschaft zwischen Repression und Vernachlässigung
No full textDas Verhältnis zwischen Staat und Zivilgesellschaft ist in letzter Zeit komplexer geworden. In einigen Ländern hat sich das Verhältnis derart verschlechtert, dass von einem shrinking space für die Zivilgesellschaft gesprochen wird. Diese Diagnose gilt jedoch hauptsächlich für autoritäre und illiberale politische Systeme, die der Zivilgesellschaft mit Repression begegnen. Zivilgesellschaftliche Räume schrumpfen jedoch auch in Demokratien: weniger durch direkte Unterdrückung, sondern durch eine politische Stagnation, die durch eine politische Vernachlässigung der Zivilgesellschaft verursacht wird. Diese führt zu einer schleichenden Erosion zivilgesellschaftlicher Kapazitäten und stellt eine zunehmende gesellschaftspolitische Herausforderung dar. Als Gegenmaßnahme plädieren wir für eine aktive Reformpolitik, wobei neuere Modelle der rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen und Regulierungen im Mittelpunkt stehen sollten, die auf eine bessere Fassung der funktionalen Differenzierung zivilgesellschaftlicher Organisationen zielen
Transatlantic Trade post-Trump - Priorities for a Pragmatic Reset
No full textAfter four turbulent years in trade relations, Europe has high expectations of the Biden administration. However, the room for big trade reforms is small and new grand-scale liberalization is neither economically necessary nor politically realistic. Accordingly, we propose a pragmatic agenda that focuses on ending ongoing trade conflicts and making progress on some WTO reforms as well as trade-adjacent issues such as climate change and supply-chain security
A New Age of Transatlantic Alliance? U.S. China policy after the presidential election and its implications for the EU
No full textThe Covid-19 pandemic and growing tensions between the U.S. and China brought even greater global attention to this year’s American presidential election. Despite the victory of the Democratic challenger Joe Biden, America’s relations with China will not significantly alter and rather resemble an iron fist in a velvet glove. While U.S.-China great power rivalry will remain the new reality, Biden’s victory could mark the beginning of a new transatlantic alliance and contribute to the EU’s geopolitical ambition. In this policy paper, Anna Stahl and Yixiang Xu argue that the EU should seize the opportunity of U.S. interest
in closer collaboration on China and offer a ten-point agenda for an EUU. S. dialogue on China. Moreover, this policy paper offers innovative policy recommendations for new formats of trilateral and multilateral cooperation with China and the U.S