Essays in environmental economics: innovation and economic performance of firms, and distributional questions

This thesis consists of two parts within the field of environmental economics. The first part contributes to the literature on the relationship between firms’ environmental and economic performance. The second part investigates distributional questions within environmental economics. The first part of this thesis consists of three co-authored chapters. Chapter 1 provides a systematic and detailed literature review on the relationship between firms’ environmental and economic performance. It is an introductory and scene-setting chapter to the subsequent two chapters. Chapter 2 examines how diversifying production towards low carbon goods and services impacts the financial performance and market valuation of firms. Using new data on firms’ revenues that are generated from the production of green goods and services, we are able to measure shifts from non-green to green activities at the firm level. The paper provides novel insight into the relationship between such green revenues and a comprehensive set of accounting- and market based economic performance measures. Chapter 3 uses event study methodology to assess the impact of the Paris Agreement on stock returns. We show that green firms, have experienced significant positive abnormal returns in the week following the agreement compared to the overall market. In addition, we show that emissions-intensity appears to be a less precise determinant for firms’ stock performance. The second part consists of two single-authored chapters. Chapter 4 examines distributional preferences for international climate finance. Understanding public preferences for climate policies is crucial to ensure and increase public support for such policies. Using a choice experiment on a representative sample of the UK population this chapter elicits preferences with respect to distributional dimensions of adaptation finance. The findings provide new insights into preferred payment mechanisms and support the adoption of egalitarian policy mandates among international climate adaptation funds. Chapter 5 contributes to the literature on distributional outcomes of natural resource wealth. We use panel regression techniques as well as the quasi-experimental synthetic control method at the country- and US state-level to estimate the effect of an oil price boom on income inequality. The paper does not find strong evidence for a significant relationship. It discusses challenges in empirically identifying effects on aggregate inequality metrics

Do financial markets respond to green opportunities?

This paper investigates whether financial markets respond to firms’ climate actions. We exploit the signing of the Paris Agreement, which required governments to commit to ambitious climate action, as a quasi-natural experiment. Using a proprietary green revenue database, we find that firms deriving a significant fraction of their revenues from green goods and services experience on average a 10% increase in cumulative abnormal returns following the Agreement. The empirical evidence indicates that financial markets are responding to opportunities associated with new green markets, and strengthening climate policies can reallocate capital to support green private sector investment

Renewable technologies in Karnataka, India: jobs potential and co-benefits

The tangible benefits of renewable energy technologies are a crucial parameter when determining the political feasibility of adopting a low-carbon development path, particularly for emerging economies. We present that these potential benefits consist of ‘green jobs’ and of a wider set of socio-economic and environmental ‘co-benefits’ that are generated simultaneously from renewable technologies in India. Based on case studies from the Indian state of Karnataka, we obtain estimates for jobs and describe co-benefits enabled by wind, off-grid solar and biomass technologies. Furthermore, we use these estimates to project the potential for future benefits that could be generated by further enhancing the use of renewable technologies towards sustainable energy policy and security. We show that enhancing green economy offers benefits that include the creation of jobs, but also delivers a much wider set of socio-economic and environmental welfare gains for emerging economies such as India. Our paper also provides valuable evidence-based analyses for policy-makers when assessing the benefits of low-carbon sustainable developmen

Do environmental and economic performance go together? A review of micro-level empirical evidence from the past decade or so

This article reviews the empirical literature combining economic and environmental performance data at the micro-level, i.e. firm or facility level. The literature has generally found a positive and statistically significant correlation between economic performance, as measured by profitability indicators or stock market returns, and environmental performance, as measured by emissions of pollutants or adoption of international environmental standards. The main reason for this finding seems to be that firms that reduce their material and energy costs experience both better economic performance and lower emissions. Only a small and recent literature analyses the joint causal impact of environmental regulations on environmental and economic performance. Interestingly, this literature shows that environmental regulations tend to improve environmental performance while not weakening economic performance. However, the evidence so far is limited to a handful of environmental regulations that are not extremely stringent, so the result cannot be easily generalized. More research is needed to assess the joint effects of environmental regulations on environmental and economic performance, to explore the heterogeneity of these effects across sectors, countries and types of policies, and to understand which policy designs allow improving environmental quality while not coming at a cost in terms of economic performance of regulated businesses

Fighting climate change: international attitudes towards climate policies

Using new surveys on more than 40,000 respondents in twenty countries that account for 72% of global CO2 emissions, we study the understanding of and attitudes toward climate change and climate policies. We show that, across countries, support for climate policies hinges on three key perceptions centered around the effectiveness o f the policies in reducing emissions (effectiveness c concerns), t heir distributional impacts on lower-income households (inequality concerns), and their impact on the respondents’ household (self-interest). We show experimentally that information specifically addressing these key concerns can substantially increase the support for climate policies in many countries. Explaining how policies work and who can benefit f rom t hem is critical to foster policy support, whereas simply informing people about the impacts of climate change is not effective. Furthermore, we identify several socioeconomic and lifestyle factors – most notably education, political leanings, and availability of public transportation – that are significantly correlated with both policy views and overall reasoning and beliefs about climate policies. However, it is difficult to predict beliefs or policy views based on these characteristics only

Fighting climate change: international attitudes towards climate policies

Using new surveys on more than 40,000 respondents in twenty countries that account for 72% of global CO2 emissions, we study the understanding of and attitudes toward climate change and climate policies. We show that, across countries, support for climate policies hinges on three key perceptions centered around the effectiveness o f the policies in reducing emissions (effectiveness c concerns), t heir distributional impacts on lower-income households (inequality concerns), and their impact on the respondents’ household (self-interest). We show experimentally that information specifically addressing these key concerns can substantially increase the support for climate policies in many countries. Explaining how policies work and who can benefit f rom t hem is critical to foster policy support, whereas simply informing people about the impacts of climate change is not effective. Furthermore, we identify several socioeconomic and lifestyle factors – most notably education, political leanings, and availability of public transportation – that are significantly correlated with both policy views and overall reasoning and beliefs about climate policies. However, it is difficult to predict beliefs or policy views based on these characteristics only

Internationalization and Digitalization in Engineering Education

[EN] Digital, virtual and E-learning elements have increasingly become a part in higher education and, most recently, the high potential of digitalization for processes of strategic internationalization of higher education institutions is coming into focus. The collaborative project of three German universities, XYZ, is working on strategies for the internationalization and virtualization of engineering education. While these topics used to be different key areas of the project, a combination of both distinguished itself as a potential new working field. This paper introduces two pilot concepts that were implemented and evaluated at the universities Y and Z which both aim at the complementation of incoming students’ experiences in Germany by digital means. At Y, a transnational online class explores means of preparing degree-mobile engineering students from all over the world for their master’s studies in Germany. At Z, an online course was designed to accompany a summer school research exchange for US-American engineering students in order to prolong their short-term mobility by digital elements. These pilot projects were well-accepted by students and faculty at both universities and their evaluations between 2014 and 2017 have revealed valuable results for further optimization. This paper presents the results and discusses future potential.Strenger, N.; May, D.; Ortelt, T.; Kruse, D.; Frerich, S.; Tekkaya, AE. (2017). Internationalization and Digitalization in Engineering Education. En Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Higher Education Advances. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 558-565. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD17.2017.528955856

The First Step of Neurospora crassa Molybdenum Cofactor Biosynthesis: Regulatory Aspects under N-Derepressing and Nitrate-Inducing Conditions

Molybdenum cofactor (Moco) is the active site prosthetic group found in all Moco dependent enzymes, except for nitrogenase. Mo-enzymes are crucial for viability throughout all kingdoms of life as they catalyze a diverse set of two electron transfer reactions. The highly conserved Moco biosynthesis pathway consists of four different steps in which guanosine triphosphate is converted into cyclic pyranopterin monophosphate, molybdopterin (MPT), and subsequently adenylated MPT and Moco. Although the enzymes and mechanisms involved in these steps are well characterized, the regulation of eukaryotic Moco biosynthesis is not. Within this work, we described the regulation of Moco biosynthesis in the filamentous fungus Neurospora crassa, which revealed the first step of the multi-step pathway to be under transcriptional control. We found, that upon the induction of high cellular Moco demand a single transcript variant of the nit-7 gene is increasingly formed pointing towards, that essentially the encoded enzyme NIT7-A is the key player for Moco biosynthesis activity in Neurospora

Fast Linear Programming through Transprecision Computing on Small and Sparse Data

A plethora of program analysis and optimization techniques rely on linear programming at their heart. However, such techniques are often considered too slow for production use. While today’s best solvers are optimized for complex problems with thousands of dimensions, linear programming, as used in compilers, is typically applied to small and seemingly trivial problems, but to many instances in a single compilation run. As a result, compilers do not benefit from decades of research on optimizing large-scale linear programming. We design a simplex solver targeted at compilers. A novel theory of transprecision computation applied from individual elements to full data-structures provides the computational foundation. By carefully combining it with optimized representations for small and sparse matrices and specialized small-coefficient algorithms, we (1) reduce memory traffic, (2) exploit wide vectors, and (3) use low-precision arithmetic units effectively. We evaluate our work by embedding our solver into a state-of-the-art integer set library and implement one essential operation, coalescing, on top of our transprecision solver. Our evaluation shows more than an order-of-magnitude speedup on the core simplex pivot operation and a mean speedup of 3.2x (vs. GMP) and 4.6x (vs. IMath) for the optimized coalescing operation. Our results demonstrate that our optimizations exploit the wide SIMD instructions of modern microarchitectures effectively. We expect our work to provide foundations for a future integer set library that uses transprecision arithmetic to accelerate compiler analyses.ISSN:2475-142

A Gene for Universal Congenital Alopecia Maps to Chromosome 8p21-22

SummaryComplete or partial congenital absence of hair (congenital alopecia) may occur either in isolation or with associated defects. The majority of families with isolated congenital alopecia has been reported to follow an autosomal-recessive mode of inheritance (MIM 203655). As yet, no gene has been linked to isolated congenital alopecia, nor has linkage been established to a specific region of the genome. In an attempt to map the gene for the autosomal recessive form of the disorder, we have performed genetic linkage analysis on a large inbred Pakistani family in which affected persons show complete absence of hair development (universal congenital alopecia). We have analyzed individuals of this family, using >175 microsatellite polymorphic markers of the human genome. A maximum LOD score of 7.90 at a recombination fraction of 0 has been obtained with locus D8S258. Haplotype analysis of recombination events localized the disease to a 15-cM region between marker loci D8S261 and D8S1771. We have thus mapped the gene for this hereditary form of isolated congenital alopecia to a locus on chromosome 8p21-22 (ALUNC [alopecia universalis congenitalis]). This will aid future identification of the responsible gene, which will be extremely useful for the understanding of the biochemistry of hair development