Creditors' Committees: An Anglo‐German Comparative Study

This article deals with the creditor's committee as a tool to increase the participation of creditors and thereby the transparency and acceptance of the office holder's decisions. For this purpose, the laws of England and Germany, as major and significant jurisdictions, will be analysed to compare the different approaches and results, particularly as regards the establishment, composition, tasks and procedure of the committee as well as the liability and the remuneration of the committee's members. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Less Government—More Wealth? On the Macroeconomics of a Smaller Public Sector in Europe

In this paper, we analyze the reactions of European economies to a fiscal policy strategy aiming at diminishing the public sector. Within the framework of the MSG3 model, a macroeconomic model of the world economy, we perform several simulation experiments to explore the effects of reducing government expenditures permanently in different phases of the business cycle. For this purpose, we combine the fiscal contraction with negative and positive, Euro Area-wide and global, supply and demand shocks. It turns out that adverse Keynesian effects on output and employment tend to be mostly weak and short-lived, whereas long-run effects on output and employment are favorable. Due to these long-run effects, the fiscal contraction policy raises welfare as measured by an asymmetric quadratic objective function. The size of these welfare effects depends on the initial situation in a non-trivial manner.     

Der Beitrag kontrolltheoretischer Methoden zur Analyse der Stabilisationspolitik

Ohne ZusammenfassungFür Anregungen und Unterstützung danke ich besonders den Herren Professoren Abele (Universität Freiburg/Schweiz), Tintner (TU Wien), Aoki (Universität Urbana/Illinois, USA) und Ferschl (Universität Wien); für allenfalls verbleibende Irrtümer bleibe ich selbst verantwortlich.     

Ökonomische Bewertung des Repowering von Onshore-Windenergieanlagen in Deutschland

Wind power takes a leading role among the renewable energy sources. Whereas in offshore wind power utilization large technical challenges still need to be tackled for commercial exploitation, the replacement of obsolete plants (repowering) in the onshore sector provides an interesting alternative. This paper first provides an overview of the technical, legal and social development concerning wind power utilization in general, and repowering in particular, in Germany. In a next step, by means of model-based analysis, the technical potential for wind power by means of repowering is determined. The theoretical potential is valuated against social aspects. Due to the large heterogeneity of candidate sites for repowering, general potential studies are not suitable for concrete investment decisions. Instead, a detailed economic feasibility study is required. In our study, we performed scenario analysis, also taking into account the repowering-specific risks. The parameter values varied are those for the quality of the site, the size of the wind park, and the age of the wind turbines to be replaced. Finally, we discuss the results and provide an outlook on the development of repowering in light of the novelized EEG. We find that, until now, the repowering potential could not be fully exploited. An intensified realization of repowering projects in the coming years can be expected, due to the technical potential, simplifications in the commissioning process, rising acceptance on the side of the communities due to changes in the tax legislation and, above all, thanks to the incentives for almost all onshore wind parks.