278 research outputs found
What Should a Cautious Immigration Policy Look Like? Bruegel Third-Party Papers, April 2007
Jakob von Weizsäcker analyses the impact of migration from the perspective of the source country and the host country. He says that Europe will need to attract high-skilled immigrants to balance the overall skill mix of immigration, and suggests an EU-wide 'Blue Card' which would grant highly skilled workers access to the entire EU labour market
A European Blue Card Proposal. Bruegel Third-Party Papers, July 2006
Jakob von Weizsäcker makes the case for a European Blue Card that would open up the EU to skilled immigrants through a points system
Neutrino-Accelerated Hot Hydrogen Burning
We examine the effects of significant electron anti-neutrino fluxes on
hydrogen burning. Specifically, we find that the bottleneck weak nuclear
reactions in the traditional pp-chain and the hot CNO cycle can be accelerated
by anti-neutrino capture, increasing the energy generation rate. We also
discuss how anti-neutrino capture reactions can alter the conditions for break
out into the rp-process. We speculate on the impact of these considerations for
the evolution and dynamics of collapsing very- and super- massive compact
objects.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, submitted to ApJ; minor content chang
Exploring the financial and investment implications of the Paris Agreement
A global energy transition is underway. Limiting warming to 2°C (or less), as envisaged in the Paris Agreement, will require a major diversion of scheduled investments in the fossil-fuel industry and other high-carbon capital infrastructure towards renewables, energy efficiency, and other low or negative carbon technologies. The article explores the scale of climate finance and investment needs embodied in the Paris Agreement. It reveals that there is little clarity in the numbers from the plethora of sources (official and otherwise) on climate finance and investment. The article compares the US100 billion figure is a fraction of the broader finance and investment needs of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, it is significant when compared to some estimates of the net incremental costs of decarbonization that take into account capital and operating cost savings. However, even if the annual US$100 billion materializes, achieving the much larger implied shifts in investment will require the enactment of long-term internationally coordinated policies, far more stringent than have yet been introduced.</i
Cyclical dimensions of labour mobility after EU enlargement. Bruegel Working Paper 2009/03, May 2009
At a time of symmetric global slowdown, migration cannot
contribute as much to absorbing economic shocks as it
could if the shock were asymmetric.
• Early evidence suggests that the crisis has led to a drop in immigration and even net return migration from some
countries. This has helped the adjustment of former EU15
host countries and has exacerbated adjustment in former
source countries in the new member states. In the short
run, the stock of new member-state migrants in the EU15
will fall owing to diminished job opportunities for migrants.
• Changes in the unemployment rate in the host country are
found to impact migration more than that of changes in the
unemployment rate in the source country. In part, this can
be explained by the disproportionate risk of migrants losing
their jobs in the downturn.
• In the longer run, the crisis is set to increase migration from
the new member states compared to what would have been
the case without the crisis. This is because the crisis has
undermined the economic growth model of those new
member states that relied heavily on external financing to
fuel their growth
Solar Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein Effect with Three Generations of Neutrinos
Under the assumption that the density variation of the electrons can be
approximated by an exponential function, the solar Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein
effect is treated for three generations of neutrinos. The generalized
hypergeometric functions that result from the exact solution of this problem
are studied in detail, and a method for their numerical evaluation is
presented. This analysis plays a central role in the determination of neutrino
masses, not only the differences of their squares, under the assumption of
universal quark-lepton mixing.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX, including 2 figure
Is it possible to construct excited-state energy functionals by splitting k-space?
We show that our procedure of constructing excited-state energy functionals
by splitting k-space, employed so far to obtain exchange energies of
excited-states, is quite general. We do so by applying the same method to
construct modified Thomas-Fermi kinetic energy functional and its gradient
expansion up to the second order for the excited-states. We show that the
resulting kinetic energy functional has the same accuracy for the
excited-states as the ground-state functionals do for the ground-states.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur
Energy efficiency and renewables
The debate between exponents of 'supply side' and 'demand side' approaches to dealing with environmental problems like climate change can sometimes become polarised. At one extreme it is sometimes claimed that the potential for energy efficiency and demands reductions is so large that we hardly need to worry about the supply side. At the other extreme it is sometimes claimed that the potential for renewables is so large that we can forget about energy conservation. This paper looks at how these views stand up in the context of both short and long term sustainable energy policy and seeks a pragmatic strategic compromise
Tax Policy, Investments in Human and Physical Capital, and Productivity
This paper analyzes the implications of tax policy for the accumulation of human and physical capital and for the overall productivity level of the economy. A comprehensive income tax, applying to both labour income and capital income. discriminates against investments in human capital relative to investments in physical capital. Hence. it has an adverse impact on human capital accumulation. Taking into account a positive external effect of investments in human capital on overall productivity, the adverse effect of income taxation on human capital investments is significantly magnified.
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