Carbon management: evidence from case studies of German firms under the EU ETS

This paper examines the management practices of German firms with obligations under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) based on six structured in-depth interviews with managers of firms from different industries and based on survey data. The paper sheds light on management and trading practices, abatement behaviour, and the impact of the EU ETS on long-term decisions, such as investment decisions or innovative capacity. The aim is to provide information on firm-internal management processes related to the EU ETS and to strengthen intuition for microeconomic consequences of greenhouse gas regulation in a cap-and-trade scheme. The analysis reveals that management practices in the EU ETS are mainly driven by emission levels, firm size, pre-existing management structures and production patterns. While larger emitters (about 100,000 tCO2 per year or larger) are perfectly capable to carry out all relevant tasks, smaller emitters behave more passively due to transaction costs and lower expected return of transactions. Our analysis suggests that institutional responds to regulation should be taken into account for the design of greenhouse gas regulation

Part 1 of Martin's Conjecture for order-preserving and measure-preserving functions

Martin's Conjecture is a proposed classification of the definable functions on the Turing degrees. It is usually divided into two parts, the first classifies functions which are not above the identity and the second of classifies functions which are above the identity. Slaman and Steel proved the second part of the conjecture for Borel functions which are order-preserving (i.e. which preserve Turing reducibility). We prove the first part of the conjecture for all order-preserving functions. We do this by introducing a class of functions on the Turing degrees which we call "measure-preserving" and proving that part 1 of Martin's Conjecture holds for all measure-preserving functions and also that all non-trivial order-preserving functions are measure-preserving. Our result on measure-preserving functions has several other consequences for Martin's Conjecture, including an equivalence between part 1 of the conjecture and a statement about the structure of the Rudin-Keisler order on ultrafilters on the Turing degrees.Comment: 44 pages; updated to correct some attributions and fix some typo

Towards IS-enabled Sustainable Communities – A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

The trend of urbanization leads to several environmental problems such as shortage of resource, pollution, and rising carbon emissions. In the smart city context sustainable communities are considered as promising measures to tackle these issues. The technological evolution of the recent years offers versatile opportunities to convince people in their behavior and the potential of information systems to support ecological improvements gains increasing importance and interest in research. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework for the design of citizen-centric environmental sustainable information systems to build sustainable communities in smart cities. The framework considers theories and counter measures from psychological, social, environmental, and IS science to create a holistic architecture for green IS implementations. The goal is to drive further research and practical implementations in this domain

The effect of electricity taxation on the German manufacturing sector : a regression discontinuity approach

Germany taxes electricity use since 1999. The government granted reduced rates to energy intensive firms in the industrial sector for addressing potentially adverse effects on firms' competitiveness. Firms that use more electricity than certain thresholds established by legislation, pay reduced marginal tax rates. As a consequence, the marginal tax rate is a deterministic and discontinuous function of electricity use. We identify and estimate the causal effects of these reduced marginal tax rates on the economic performance of firms using a regression discontinuity design. Our econometric analysis relies on official micro-data at the plant and firm level collected by the German Federal Statistical Office that cover the whole manufacturing sector. We do not find any systematic, statistically significant effects of the electricity tax on firms' turnover, exports, value added, investment and employment. The results suggest that eliminating the reduced marginal electricity tax rates could increase revenues for the government without adversely affecting firms' economic performance

Energie vom extensiven Grünland? - Alternative Bioenergiesysteme im Öko-Landbau

Ökologische wirtschaftende Betriebe bewirtschaften zumeist extensives Grünland und nehmen in diesem Zusammenhang oft an Agrarumweltprogrammen teil. Auf extensiven Grünlandstandorten ist die Wirtschaftlichkeit herkömmlicher Produktionsverfahren wie Milchvieh- oder Mutterkuhhaltung jedoch oft nur unzureichend gegeben. Das neu entwickelte IFBB-Verfahren (Integrierte Festbrennstoff- und Biogasproduktion aus Biomasse) könnte eine alternative Nutzung des Extensivgrünlands für die Erzeugung erneuerbarer Energien aus extensivem Grünaufwuchs darstellen. Eine Expertenbefragung unter Landwirten im Vogelsbergkreis, Hessen, konnte Rahmenbedingungen des extensiven Grünlandmanagements sowie Vor- und Nachteile der Einführung des IFBB-Verfahrens auf einzelbetrieblicher Ebene identifizieren. Auf der Grundlage der ermittelten Daten deutet die Berechnung von Veredelungswerten von je zwei Tierhaltungs-, Bioenergie- und Landschaftspflegeverfahren an, dass extensives Grünland neben den Landschaftspflegeverfahren besonders wirtschaftlich in alternativen Bioenergieverfahren eingesetzt werden kann

Telemonitoring of Real-World Health Data in Cardiology: A Systematic Review

Background New sensor technologies in wearables and other consumer health devices open up promising opportunities to collect real-world data. As cardiovascular diseases remain the number one reason for disease and mortality worldwide, cardiology offers potent monitoring use cases with patients in their out-of-hospital daily routines. Therefore, the aim of this systematic review is to investigate the status quo of studies monitoring patients with cardiovascular risks and patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases in a telemedical setting using not only a smartphone-based app, but also consumer health devices such as wearables and other sensor-based devices. Methods A literature search was conducted across five databases, and the results were examined according to the study protocols, technical approaches, and qualitative and quantitative parameters measured. Results Out of 166 articles, 8 studies were included in this systematic review; these cover interventional and observational monitoring approaches in the area of cardiovascular diseases, heart failure, and atrial fibrillation using various app, wearable, and health device combinations. Conclusions Depending on the researcher's motivation, a fusion of apps, patient-reported outcome measures, and non-invasive sensors can be orchestrated in a meaningful way, adding major contributions to monitoring concepts for both individual patients and larger cohorts

SesameTM: Building Topic Maps on RDF

Over the past decade RDF has developed to become the dominant standard for representation and interchange of structured data on the web. In portal development, widely unrecognized by Semantic Web research, subject-centric topic maps are actively used and have evolved from an ancient SGML and intermittent XML-based standard to a pure data model. This data model can be represented as a graph and served various integration strategies, put forward over the past years, as a starting point. However, none of these strategies really appreciates the way in which the technologies are used resulting in a poor tool interoperability. To overcome this state we propose a Topic Maps engine acting as congurable wrapper for Sesame. The software library we develop and describe in this paper implements the Topic Maps Application Programming Interface (TMAPI) enabling the usage of Topic Maps infrastructure instead of working at the level of RDF triples

Perceived Similarity, Expectation-Reality Discrepancies, and Mentors\u27 Expressed Intention to Remain in Big Brothers/Big Sisters Programs

Studies have begun to document the academic and psychosocial benefits of Big Brothers/ Big Sisters programs for at-risk youth (Rhodes, Grossman, & Resch, 2000). However, investigators have noted a problem with mentor attrition (Meissen & Lounsbury, 1981). The purpose of the current study was twofold. First, we explored the relative importance of specific dimensions of perceived similarity (including similarity in attitudes, interests, race, and personality) as well as mentors\u27 expectation-reality discrepancies in predicting mentors\u27 expressed intention to remain in Big Brothers/Big Sisters programs. Second, we examined a model whereby interpersonal attraction and relationship quality served as mediators of these associations. Our results suggest that perceived similarity in extraver-sion as well as the discrepancy between mentors\u27 ideal versus actual roles were significant predictors of mentors\u27 expressed intention to remain in the relationship. Relationship quality and interpersonal attraction appeared to mediate these findings