Industrielle Umweltkostenrechnung

Die produktbezogene Umweltkostenrechnung geht getrennt nach den Arten der Umweltkosten vor, d.h. nach Entsorgungskosten, Verwertungskosten und Kosten der Verringerung der Menge oder der Sch?dlichkeit der Abf?lle.     

Heilkraft aus dem Garten

Kamille gegen Entzündungen, Lindenblüten gegen Erk?ltungen, Gurgeln mit Salbei gegen Halsweh – Heilpflanzen und Kr?uter sind seit Jahrtausenden Bestandteile der Medizin. Heute k?nnen wir zwar einzelne Bestandteile der Pflanzen isolieren, ihre Wirksamkeit wissenschaftlich nachweisen und sie in Medikamente einbauen. Doch die Natur ist nicht zu kopieren: Sie kombiniert in jeder Heilpflanze mehrere unterschiedliche Wirkstoffe.     

The Biases that Limit Our Thinking about the Economic Outlook and Policy

To make effective private-sector decisions and government policy, it is important for those who make decisions and those who are impacted by them to know whether these decisions might be influenced by underlying biases. This paper enumerates and discusses potential biases, their sources, and how they might influence selected policies and decisions.     

Unlocking value: Equity carve outs as strategic real options

Equity carve outs, the partial listing of a corporate subsidiary, appear to be transitory arrangements, usually dissolved within a few years by either a complete sale or a buy back. Why do firms perform expensive listings just to reverse them thereafter? We interpret carve outs of a production unit as strategic options to attract information from the market over its value as an independent entity. This improves the decision to exercise the option to sell out or to regain control. A listing is costly, as it reduces coordination of production, but generates valuable information from the market over the optimal allocation of ownership. We compute the optimal timing for the final sale or buy back decisions, the value of the strategic options embedded in the carve out and the optimal shares retained. The model explains the temporary nature of carve outs, and suggests an explanation for many empirical findings. In particular, it explains why carve outs are more common in highly uncertain sectors and in more informative markets.     

Digital governance and the reconstruction of the Indian anti-poverty system

On a global scale, programmes of social protection for the poor are becoming increasingly computerised, and architectures of biometric recognition are being widely used in this respect. I research how these architectures, adopted in anti-poverty systems, structure ways to ‘see the state’ for citizens living in poverty. To do so I study India’s Public Distribution System (PDS) in Kerala, which is augmenting its main food security scheme with the computerised recognition of its users. In the government’s narrative, biometric technology is depicted as an optimal solution to the illicit diversion of PDS goods on the market. Nevertheless, according to the multiple narratives collected across the state, beneficiaries dispute this view in different ways because of the mixed effects of the new technology on their entitlements under the PDS. The government’s capability to reconstruct its image through digital innovation is thus found to be constrained by citizens’ perceptions derived from their encounters with the new technology of governance.     

Why do parents socialize their children to behave pro-socially? An information-based theory

We present a model of intergenerational transmission of pro-social values in which parents have information about relevant characteristics of society that is not directly available to their children. Differently from existing models of cultural transmission of values (such as Bisin and Verdier, 2001, Tabellini, 2008) we assume that parents are exclusively concerned with their children's material welfare. If parents coordinate their educational choices, a child would look at her system of values to predict the values of her contemporaries, with whom she may interact. A parent may thus choose to instill pro-social values into his child in order to signal to her that others can generally be trusted. This implies that parents may optimally decide to endow their children with values that stand in contrast with maximization of material welfare, even if their children's material welfare is all they care about.