Hertie School Research Repository
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Networked Cooperation: How the European Union Mobilizes Peacekeeping Forces to Project Power Abroad
No full textHow does the European Union (EU) recruit troops and police to serve in EU peacekeeping missions? This article suggests that pivotal EU member states and EU officials make strategic use of the social and institutional networks within which they are embedded to bargain reluctant states into providing these forces. These networks offer information on deployment preferences, facilitate side-payments and issue-linkages, and provide for credible commitments. EU operations are consequently not necessarily dependent on intra-EU preference convergence—as is often suggested in the existing literature. Rather, EU force recruitment hinges on highly proactive EU actors, which use social and institutional ties to negotiate fellow states into serving in an EU missions
Heating with Wind: Economics of heat pumps and variable renewables
No full textWith the growth of wind and solar energy in electricity supply, the electrification of space and water heating is becoming a promising decarbonization option. In turn, such electrification may help the power system integration of variable renewables, for two reasons: thermal storage could provide low-cost flexibility, and heat demand is seasonally correlated with wind power. However, temporal fluctuations in heat demand may also imply new challenges for the power system. This study assesses the economic characteristics of electric heat pumps and wind energy and studies their interaction on wholesale electricity markets. Using a numerical electricity market model, we estimate the economic value of wind energy and the economic cost of powering heat pumps. We find that, just as expanding wind energy depresses its €/MWhel value, adopting heat pumps increases their €/MWhel cost. This rise can be mitigated by synergistic effects with wind power, “system-friendly” heat pump technology, and thermal storage. Furthermore, heat pumps raise the wind market value, but this effect vanishes if accounting for the additional wind energy needed to serve the heat pump load. Thermal storage facilitates the system integration of wind power but competes with other flexibility options. For an efficient adoption of heat pumps and thermal storage, we argue that retail tariffs for heat pump customers should reflect their underlying economic cost
Improving Management with Individual and Group-Based Consulting: Results from a Randomized Experiment in Colombia
No full textDifferences in management quality are an important contributor to productivity differences across countries. A key question is then how to best improve poor management in developing countries. We test two different approaches to improving management in Colombian auto parts firms. The first uses intensive and expensive one-on-one consulting, while the second draws on agricultural extension approaches to provide consulting to small groups of firms at approximately one-third of the cost of the individual approach. Both approaches lead to improvements in management practices of a similar magnitude (8-10 percentage points), so that the new group-based approach dominates on a cost-benefit basis. Moreover, authors find some evidence that the group-based intervention led to increases in firm size over the next 1.5 years, including a statistically significant increase in employment, while the impacts on firm outcomes are smaller and statistically insignificant for the individual consulting. The results point to the potential of group-based approaches as a pathway to scaling up management improvements
A new societal contract
No full textThis paper argues that the traditional social contract that underlies the free market economy has run its course and needs to be replaced by a new contract, based on a new conception of the “empowering economy.” Whereas different social contracts are relevant to different societies, all these contracts have some features in common, addressing some basic human needs that are common to all. These are needs that every thriving society must satisfy. In the presence of current global problems – such as climate change and financial crises – satisfying these needs can also generate the popular approval for multilateral agreements to tackle these problems. The paper identifies three inconvenient truths for the existing social contract: (i) economic performance involves more than material prosperity, (ii) free markets naturally generate inequality, and (iii) human progress rests primarily on cooperation. In response, the paper proposes a new social contract that can be promoted through three policy approaches: (1) policy that focuses not just on material prosperity, but also on personal empowerment and social solidarity, (2) automatic stabilizers that reduce inequalities of economic power and (3) policy that develops the human capabilities of cooperation
A Predictive Test of Voters' Economic Benchmarking: The 2013 Bundestag Election
No full textDo voters judge their national economy relative to economic performance abroad? In 2013 we took advantage of the German Bundestag election to test this hypothesis predictively. Nearly two months prior to the election, we published an election forecast relying on a theory-driven empirical model of election outcomes that draws on previous election outcomes; characteristics of the government and of voters; and, most originally, the relative economic performance of Germany (‘benchmarked' growth) in comparison to the three other most important economies in Europe – France, the UK and Italy. Our forecast put the outgoing coalition government of CDU/CSU and FDP at 47.05 per cent of the popular vote deviating from the actual outcome of 46.3 by 0.75 points. This makes our forecast one of the most accurate in this election cycle. Despite one-and-a-half months of lead time, our forecast performed on par or slightly better than the last poll results issued only two days before the election
Economic voting in a crisis: the Irish election of 2011
No full textThe paper explores a question raised by the 2011 Irish election, which saw an almost unprecedented decline in support for a major governing party after an economic collapse that necessitated an ECB/IMF ‘bailout’. This seems a classic case of ‘economic voting’ in which a government is punished for incompetent performance. How did the government lose this support: gradually, as successive economic indicators appeared negative, or dramatically, following major shocks? The evidence points to losses at two critical junctures. This is consistent with an interpretation of the link between economics and politics that allows for qualitative judgements by voters in assigning credit and blame for economic performance
Reading The Tea Leaves: Medvedev’s Presidency Through Political Rhetoric Of Federal And Sub-National Actors
No full textIn the absence of public information on the inner workings of the Russian political regime, especially during Medvedev’s presidency, outside observers often have to rely on politicians’ unguarded comments or subjective analysis. Instead, we turn to quantitative text analysis of political rhetoric. Treating governors as a quasi-expert panel, we argue that policy positions revealed in regional legislative addresses explain how elites perceived the distribution of power between Putin and Medvedev. We find that governors moved from a neutral position in 2009 to a clearly pro-Putin position in 2011, and that policy initiatives advocated by Medvedev all but evaporated from the rhetoric of governors in 2012
Sequencing to ratchet up climate policy stringency
No full textThe Paris Agreement formulates the goal of GHG neutrality in the second half of this century. Given that Nationally Determined Contributions are as yet insufficient, the question is through which policies can this goal be realized? Identifying policy pathways to ratchet up stringency is instrumental, but little guidance is available. We propose a policy sequencing framework and substantiate it using the cases of Germany and California. Its core elements are policy options to overcome barriers to stringency over time. Such sequencing can advance policy design and hopefully reconcile the controversy between first-best and second-best approaches