Legal, compliant and suitable: The ECB‘s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP).BertelsmannStiftung/jacques Delors Centre Policy Brief 25 March 2020

The ECB has announced a 750-billion-euro purchase programme to fight the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But like all ECB programmes in recent years, the new Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) will likely be challenged in court. This policy brief assesses whether the PEPP will likely survive a legal challenge. It argues that the PEPP is compatible with EU law because it meets the three criteria the Court of Justice of the EU has established to check the legality of monetary policy measures: First, the PEPP falls within the ECB’s mandate. Second, it respects the principle of proportionality. And third, it does not violate the prohibition of monetary financing. This assessment even holds if the ECB were to relax some of the constraints in the PEPP like the issuer limit currently applicable to other bond-buying programmes

Legal, compliant and suitable: The ECB‘s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP). Bertelsmann Stiftung Policy Brief March 2020.

The ECB has announced a 750-billion-euro purchase programme to fight the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But like all ECB program- mes in recent years, the new Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) will likely be challenged in court. This policy brief assesses whether the PEPP will likely survive a legal challenge. It argues that the PEPP is com- patible with EU law because it meets the three criteria the Court of Justice of the EU has established to check the legality of monetary policy measu- res: First, the PEPP falls within the ECB’s mandate. Second, it respects the principle of proportionality. And third, it does not violate the prohibition of monetary financing. This assessment even holds if the ECB were to relax some of the constraints in the PEPP like the issuer limit currently applicable to other bond-buying programmes

Legal, compliant and suitable: The ECB‘s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP)

The ECB has announced a 750-billion-euro purchase programme to fight the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But like all ECB programmes in recent years, the new Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) will likely be challenged in court. This policy brief assesses whether the PEPP will likely survive a legal challenge. It argues that the PEPP is compatible with EU law because it meets the three criteria the Court of Justice of the EU has established to check the legality of monetary policy measures: First, the PEPP falls within the ECB’s mandate. Second, it respects the principle of proportionality. And third, it does not violate the prohibition of monetary financing. This assessment even holds if the ECB were to relax some of the constraints in the PEPP like the issuer limit currently applicable to other bond-buying programmes

Sharing the fiscal burden of the crisis: A Pandemic Solidarity Instrument for the EU. Bertelsmann Stiftung Policy Paper April 2020.

The debate over how Europe should cope with the fiscal costs of the COVID-19 pan- demic is in full swing. Adversaries and opponents of “Coronabonds” seem suddenly back in the trenches of the euro crisis. Our proposal attempts to build a bridge bet- ween the two camps: We do not propose a full-on Eurobond or any mutualisation of existing debt, as this is not how we should overcome the unique challenges of this crisis. Instead, we propose a Pandemic Solidarity Instrument that is tailored speci- fically to this crisis. The EU does not need another layer of market-access insurance, as the European Central Bank and the European Stability Mechanism are already in place for this. What it needs is an instrument to share the costs of the crisis. The main problem the EU faces now is that some member states have entered this crisis in a much weaker economic position and with higher debt levels than others. At the same time, all countries have a vital interest in all other countries being able to spend as much as necessary to fight the economic fallout of the pandemic. To ensure that this happens, we need a burden sharing of the fiscal costs of this crisis. The Pandemic Solidarity Instrument delivers this burden sharing. It should be set up as an EU instrument: The EU would borrow 440 billion euros in the market, ba- cked by the EU budget and by guarantees of the member states. As this would be EU debt, it would not count as debt of individual member states. The bonds issued by the EU would have long maturities and could be refinanced in the market at the end of their terms; otherwise, they would be repaid once they come due according to the future state of economic strength of member states. The funds would be used for four purposes: • Grants to member states to partially cover health-related costs; • Guarantees to the European Investment Bank to provide liquidity to European companies; • Subsidies to member states so that they can fund short-time work schemes and short-term unemployment benefits; • Co-financing of national stimulus packages once confinement measures have been lifted. The Instrument would be based on Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. This article gives the EU wide discretion to act in emergency situations. In our legal analysis, we show how this article allows the EU to bor- row in this specific context and why our proposal does not conflict with the EU’s no-bailout clause

Towards register allocation of SSA-form programs

In this technical report, we present an architecture for register allocation on the SSA-form. We show, how the properties of SSA-form programs and their interference graphs can be exploited to develop new methods for spilling, coloring and coalescing. We present heuristic and optimal solution methods for these three subtasks

Sharing the fiscal burden of the crisis - A Pandemic Solidarity Instrument for the EU

EU member states must share the burden of the fiscal costs of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Pandemic Solidarity Instrument delivers such burden sharing: The EU would borrow 440 billion euros in the market and would give it as grants to member states for specific spending in areas such as health care, short-time works schemes or stimulus packages; it would also give guarantees to the European Investment Bank to provide liquidity to European companies

BlueCollar: Optimizing Worker Paths on Factory Shop Floors with Visual Analytics

The optimization of a factory\u27s productivity regarding quality and efficiency is an important task in the manufacturing domain. To optimize the productivity, production lines are optimized to have short transportation paths and short processing times at the stations that process intermediate components or the final product. A factory\u27s layout is a key factor in this optimization aspect. This optimization mostly comprises the machine tools\u27 positions with respect to places where supply goods are being delivered and other tools are stationed, often neglecting the paths that workers need to take at the shop floor. This impairs a factory\u27s productivity, as machines may need to wait for workers, who operated another machine and are still on the way due to the long distance between the machines. In this work, we present BlueCollar, a visual analytics approach that supports layout planners to explore and optimize existing factory layouts regarding the paths taken by workers. Planners can visually inspect the paths that workers need to take based on their work schedule and the factory\u27s layout. An estimation of distribution algorithm supports them in choosing which layout elements, e.g., shared tool caches, to relocate. Its intermediate and final results are used to provide visual cues for suitable relocation areas, and to suggest new layouts automatically. We demonstrate our approach through an application scenario based on a realistic prototype layout provided by an external company

Learning from weather and climate science to prepare for a future pandemic

Established pandemic models have yielded mixed results to track and forecast the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. To prepare for future outbreaks, the disease-modeling community can improve their modeling capabilities by learning from the methods and insights from another arena where accurate modeling is paramount: the weather and climate research field. To prepare for future outbreaks, the disease-modeling community should draw on the methods and insights of the weather and climate research field. Image credit: Shutterstock/NASA Images. We argue that these improvements fall into four categories: model development, international comparisons, data exchange, and risk communication. A proper quantification of uncertainties in observations and models—including model assumptions, tail risks, and appropriate communication using probabilistic, Bayesian-based approaches—did not receive enough attention during the pandemic. Standardized testing and international comparison of model results is routine in climate modeling. No equivalent currently exists for pandemic models. Sharing of data is urgently needed. The homogenized real-time international data exchange, as organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) since the 1960s, can serve as a role model for a global (privacy-preserving) data exchange by the World Health Organization. Lastly, researchers can look to climate change and high-impact weather forecasting to glean lessons about risk communication and the role of science in decision-making, in order to avoid common pitfalls and guide communication. Each of the four improvements is detailed here.publishedVersio

Investigation of shock-induced flow separation over a transonic compressor blade by conditionally averaged PIV and high-speed shadowgraphs

The impact of separation control has been investigated in a highly loaded transonic compressor cascade at an inlet Mach number of 1.21 and a chord based Reynolds number of 1.4 × 106. Applied control devices are air jet vortex generators (AJVG) and a surface roughness patch. Comparative flows without transition control imply a variation of the upstream turbulence level from 0.5% to 2.5%. Above the suction side, velocities of the unsteady separation region have been captured by particle image velocimetry (PIV). The aerodynamic load alternation due to shock motion results in flexure of the blade surface which has been measured and compensated prior to PIV processing. Single PIV shots indicate shape variations of both the lambda shock system and the associated separation region while the shock foot position is fluctuating within a range of up to 23% of chord. Large sets of statistically independent PIV samples are conditionally averaged upon instantaneous passage shock positions at a resolution of 1% of chord length to quantify the size of flow separation. Large bubble separation occurs if the turbulence of the incoming flow is low. The separation region becomes smaller when AJVGs are applied but still exhibits bubble separation at rear shock positions. The size of the separation region is significantly reduced either if a roughness patch is applied or if the turbulence level of the incoming flow is high. The frequency range of shock motion is analyzed by shock tracking on the basis of high speed shadowgraphs. A Fourier analysis of shock motion in the low frequency range (<1khz) indicates the highest spectral densities for the turbulent case and the lowest densities if roughness patch are applied. Joined probability density distributions of blade displacements and amplitudes of shock movement revealed that upward transverse blade deflections are more frequent at shock positions downstream of the mean shock position while downward deflections are more frequent at frontal shock position