Is it adaptive to disengage from demands of social change? Adjustment to developmental barriers in opportunity-deprived regions

This paper investigates how individuals deal with demands of social and economic change in the domains of work and family when opportunities for their mastery are unfavorable. Theoretical considerations and empirical research suggest that with unattainable goals and unmanageable demands motivational disengagement and self-protective cognitions bring about superior outcomes than continued goal striving. Building on research on developmental deadlines, this paper introduces the concept of developmental barriers to address socioeconomic conditions of severely constrained opportunities in certain geographical regions. Mixed-effects methods were used to model cross-level interactions between individual-level compensatory secondary control and regional-level opportunity structures in terms of social indicators for the economic prosperity and family friendliness. Results showed that disengagement was positively associated with general life satisfaction in regions that were economically devastated and has less than average services for families. In regions that were economically well off and family-friendly, the association was negative. Similar results were found for self-protection concerning domain-specific satisfaction with life. These findings suggest that compensatory secondary control can be an adaptive way of mastering a demand when primary control is not possible

Why electricity market models yield different results: Carbon pricing in a model-comparison experiment

The European electricity industry, the dominant sector of the world's largest cap-and-trade scheme, is one of the most-studied examples of carbon pricing. In particular, numerical models are often used to study the uncertain future development of carbon prices and emissions. While parameter uncertainty is often addressed through sensitivity analyses, the potential uncertainty of the models themselves remains unclear from existing single model studies. This study investigates such model-related uncertainty by running a structured model comparison experiment, which exposes five numerical power sector models to aligned input parameters-finding stark model differences. At a carbon price of 27 EUR/t in 2030, the models estimate that European power sector emissions will decrease by 36-57% when compared to 2016. Most of this variation can be explained by the extent to which models consider the market-driven decommissioning of coal-and lignite-fired power plants. Higher carbon prices of 57 and 87 EUR/t yield a stronger decrease in carbon emissions, by 45-75% and 52-80%, respectively. The lower end of these ranges can be attributed to the short-term fuel switch captured by dispatch only models. The higher reductions correspond to models that additionally consider market-based investment in renewables. By further studying cross-model variation in the remaining emissions at high carbon prices, the representation of combined heat and power is identified as another crucial driver of differences across model results

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TIB: RN 5546 (1982,3 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman