Hertie School Research Repository
Not a member yet
2650 research outputs found
Sort by
The Politics of Diplomacy: How the United States builds Multilateral Military Coalitions
No full textThe conventional wisdom advances that formal alliance structures guide military coalition-building processes: allies band together because they share threat perceptions, political ideology, norms and values. This article suggests otherwise. It proposes that U.S.-led coalition-building is first and foremost a diplomatic process influenced by bilateral and multilateral institutions other than formal alliances. The breadth of institutions matters because it allows accessing information on the potential coalition partner's deployment preferences that are not only related to the security aspect of the operation but also its political, economic and other facets. In addition, diplomatic embeddedness offers linkage opportunities between military and non-military interests, which facilitates the construction of side-payments
UN Fatalities 1948-2015: A New Dataset
No full textThis article presents a new dataset on UN peacekeeping fatalities that occurred during 1948-2015. The data includes five types of fatality counts: total fatalities, fatalities caused by accidents, illness, malicious acts (i.e., hostile deaths) and a fourth category marked 'other incident types.' For every UN operation during 1948-2015, data on the number of these four types of UN fatalities are coded at the yearly as well as monthly level. The monthly data also indicate the nationality of the deceased
Open Power System Data - Frictionless data for electricity system modelling
No full textThe quality of electricity system modelling heavily depends on the input data used. Although a lot of data is publicly available, it is often dispersed, tedious to process and partly contains errors. We argue that a central provision of input data for modelling has the character of a public good: it reduces overall societal costs for quantitative energy research as redundant work is avoided, and it improves transparency and reproducibility in electricity system modelling. This paper describes the Open Power System Data platform that aims at realising the efficiency and quality gains of centralised data provision by collecting, checking, processing, aggregating, documenting and publishing data required by most modellers. We conclude that the platform can provide substantial benefits to energy system analysis by raising efficiency of data pre-processing, providing a method for making data pre-processing for energy system modelling traceable, flexible and reproducible and improving the quality of original data published by data providers
Essays in Behavioral Public Economics
Get PDFThis dissertation uses detailed micro data to shed light on issues affecting decision making in the administration of public resources. By helping to understand these dynamics, it informs the design of more effective policies, which ultimately translates into an increase in social welfare. In particular, it studies the role of cognitive limitations and social dynamics on the collection and use of public resources. The analysis of this question is carried out in three separate chapters, using administrative data at the sub-national level in a variety of settings.
The first chapter analyzes the presence of interactions between economic agents on the expenditure side of public finances. Specially, it studies the presence of fiscal interactions on the expenditure decisions of local governments in Colombia. The next two chapters focus on the revenue side of public finances, and analyze the role of social norms and cognitive limitations on individual compliance in two different settings. The second chapter studies the role of intergenerational transmission of social norms on property tax compliance in Argentina. Finally, the third chapter investigates the effect of salience and information simplification on timely compliance for the payment of speeding tickets in the Czech Republic
Open data for electricity modeling: Legal aspects
No full textPower system modeling is data intensive. In Europe, electricity system data is often available from sources such as statistical offices or system operators. However, it is often unclear if these data can be legally used for modeling, and in particular if such use infringes intellectual property rights. This article reviews the legal status of power system data, both as a guide for data users and for data publishers. It is based on interpretation of the law, a review of the secondary literature, an analysis of the licenses used by major data distributors, expert interviews, and a series of workshops. A core finding is that in many cases the legality of current practices is doubtful: in fact, it seems likely that modelers infringe intellectual property rights quite regularly. This is true for industry analysis but also academic researchers. A straightforward solution is open data – the idea that data can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose. To be open, it is not sufficient for data to be accessible free of cost, it must also come with an open data license, the most common types of which are also reviewed in this paper
Consensus, compromise and “inclusive agreement”: Negotiating supranational governance
No full textNegotiated “policy-arrangements” and their institutionalization are at the heart of global governance. This chapter focuses on the European Union (EU) as one particular arena that produces binding decisions beyond the nation state. For scholars of global governance, the EU constitutes an interesting but idiosyncratic case: the EU’s system of decision-making and enforcement is highly institutionalized; the EU covers a broad policy-remit, touching upon core areas of national sovereignty such as monetary policy or border control; and the EU is exceptionally intrusive and effective, producing binding laws that are widely complied with in its member states. At the same time, the nature of supranational governance – famously described as “less than a federation, more than a regime” (Wallace 1983) – remains open and undefined. For scholars of argumentation, deliberation and persuasion, the European Union is an equally fruitful object of study: the EU’s deliberative decision-style is used to explain compliance with European law (Neyer 2004); the EU is conceptualized as an actor that projects “normative” rather than military power (Manners 2002) and the supranational decision-process serves as testing ground for theories of deliberation (Eriksen and Fossum 2000; Joerges and Neyer 1997a, 1997b), argumentation (Naurin 2010), problem-solving (Elgström and Jönsson 2000), rhetorical action (Schimmelfennig 2001) and judgment (Kornprobst 2008)