Die von dem Bündnis Meine Landwirtschaft organisierte Großdemonstration Wir haben es satt! findet seit zehn Jahren zum Auftakt der Agrarmesse Grüne Woche in Berlin statt. Das Bündnis setzt sich für eine nachhaltige, faire Landwirtschaft und Lebensmittelproduktion ein und unterstützt deutschlandweit bäuerliche Betriebe. Am 18. Januar 2020 haben Forscher*innen der Freien Universität Berlin in Kooperation mit dem Institut für Protest- und Bewegungsforschung eine umfassende Befragung der Beteiligten der Wir haben es satt!-Demonstration durchgeführt. Die so gewonnenen Daten geben Aufschluss darüber, wer die Demonstrant*innen waren, was ihre Anliegen und politischen Haltungen sind und, nicht zuletzt, wie sie durch ihr eigenes Verhalten in Konsum und Lebensführung eine andere Landwirtschaft unterstützen. Ein Großteil der Befragten der Wir haben es satt!-Demonstration identifizierte sich als weiblich und ordnete sich politisch als links der Mitte ein. Ältere Kohorten waren insgesamt etwas stärker vertreten. Wie bei vielen Protesten in Deutschland stellen die Befragten einen spezifischen sozio-ökonomischen Ausschnitt der Bevölkerung dar: zwei Drittel geben an, einen Universitätsabschluss zu haben, die meisten verfügen über ein mittleres bis hohes Einkommen. Vor allem waren die Demonstrant*innen stark politisch engagiert; viele von ihnen sind Mitglieder in politischen Organisationen, sehr erfahrene Demonstrant*innen und vertraut mit den gesellschaftspolitischen Kämpfen zu Klima- und Umweltpolitik. Für weniger als zwei Prozent war dies die erste Demonstration überhaupt. Da es bei der Demonstrationsbefragung nicht möglich war, auch den an die Wir haben es satt!-Demonstration angegliederten Traktoren-Umzug fußläufig zu befragen, handelt es sich zudem bei den Teilnehmer*innen der Befragung vor allem um Konsument* innen. Nur sehr wenige der Befragten produzieren selbst Lebensmittel zu kommerziellen Zwecken. Diese spezifische Gesellschaftsgruppe kann als ernährungsbewusst bezeichnet werden. Sie trifft ethische Kaufentscheidungen und hat ein großes Interesse daran hat, die eigenen Anliegen zu äußern.

This paper examines the effect of weather shocks on violent crime using disaggregated data from Brazilian municipalities over the period 1991-2015. I document that adverse weather shocks in the form of droughts lead to a significant increase in violent crime, with the effect appearing to persist beyond the growing season and over the medium run. To explain this persistence, I show that weather uctuations are positively associated not only with agriculture yields, but also with the overall economic activity. Moreover, evidence shows the dominance of opportunity cost mechanism reected in the uctuations of the labor income especially for the agriculture and unskilled workers, giving credence that it is indeed the labor income that matters and not the general socio-economic conditions. Other factors such as local government budget capacity, (un)-employment, poverty, inequality, and psychological factors do not seem to explain violent crime rates.

This paper explores the underlying aspects surrounding emotional labor in everyday life inside news-rooms and how these aspects contribute to discursively (de)stabilize journalism as an institution. In order to do this, we apply the literature on affect and emotion in journalism as well as on discursive institutionalism to the analysis of a particular moment of crisis: the fraud scandal around Claas Relo-tius, an award-winning German reporter for the news magazine Der Spiegel. The discovery of his massive fake feature stories caused a fierce and controversial discussion on the media about struc-tural problems in journalism as well as the use of emotion in feature stories and exclusion mecha-nisms inside the newsroom. In our textual analysis of 138 articles on this case published in German and selected international media between December 2018 and December 2019, we uncovered four main areas in which the role of emotions is discursively negotiated (1) Form: feature stories and their use of emotions, (2) Actor: emotional attributions to Relotius, (3) Practice: emotions as part of edito-rial practices, understood here as emotional labor in the newsroom, and (4) Institution: the descrip-tion of the event and its affective implications for journalism as a whole.

The Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) was the first university in Germany to declare a state of climate emergency in December 2019, including a commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2025. This decision highlights the universities’ commitment to embed sustainability systematically and climate protection in their institutions and international networks. In the last years, the university has made great progress in both quantifying and reducing many greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. One of the areas in which there is still potential for reducing CO2 emissions is that of academic business, research and study-related air travel. The goal of this report is to provide insights into UAS-participants habits and attitudes about flying, travelling, carbon offsets and virtual communication as a key step to create and implement emissions reduction strategies.

This paper analyzes higher education funding in Germany from a distributional perspective. For this, I first compare the quantitative importance of different funding instruments, from free tuition to subsidized health insurance for students. I show that free tuition is, by far, the most important instrument. Then, I take a lifetime perspective and assess how individuals of different expected lifetime incomes benefit from higher education funding. I distinguish between different fields of study as there are large differences in both the expected lifetime earnings of graduating from a specific field and the social cost of tuition associated with each field. Finally, I focus exclusively on the instrument of subsidized tuition and simulate the introduction of different tuition fee schemes with income-contingent loans. While the distributional effects would be sizable in absolute terms, I estimate that they would cause few individuals to change their educational decisions.

We quantify the private and fiscal lifetime returns to higher education in Germany accounting for the redistribution through the tax-and-transfer system, cohort effects, and the effect of income pooling within households. For this purpose we build a dynamic microsimulation model that simulates individual life cycles of a young German cohort in terms of several key variables, such as employment, earnings, and household formation. To estimate the returns to higher education, we link our dynamic microsimulation model to a tax-benefit simulator that allows converting gross wages into disposable incomes. On average, we find private and fiscal returns that are substantially higher than current market interest rates. However, analyzing the distribution of returns we also find that there is a considerable share of young adults for whom we forecast vocational training, the alternative to higher education, to be financially more rewarding. We demonstrate how the taxtransfer system and income pooling within couple households affect private returns and decompose the fiscal returns into its major components.

A project team, made up of scholars and experts from the Chinese Academy of Governance, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing Normal University, and Chongqing Academy of Governance, has studied the economic reach of the nonprofit sector in China, in response to calls from peers in the field and entrusted by the Narada Foundation. Under the leadership of Professor Ma Qingyu from the Chinese Academy of Governance, the project team measured the economic scope of China’s nonprofit sector to the end of 2016, using a stratified systematic sampling method.

In railway transportation, each train needs to have a timetable that specifies which track at which time will be occupied by it. This task can be addressed by automatization techniques both in generating a timetable and in optimizing an existing one. In this paper, we give an overview on the state of the art of these techniques. We study the computation of a technically valid slot for a train that guarantees a (short) spatial and temporal way through the network. Furthermore, the construction of a cyclic timetable where trains operate e.g. every 60 minutes, and the simultaneous construction of timetables for multiple trains are considered in this paper. Finally, timetables also need to be robust against minor delays. We will review the state of the art in the literature for these aspects of railway timetabling with respect to models, solution algorithms, complexity results and applications in practice.

Smart Farming, Drohnen, per Satellit gesteuerte Traktoren, die Nutzung von Klima- und Wetterdaten durch Big Data oder die Anwendung von synthetischer Biologie: Ist die Digitalisierung von Landwirtschaft und Ernährung tatsächlich das neue Wundermittel, um Hungerkrisen zu beenden, den Verlust an Biodiversität zu stoppen oder den Klimawandel aufzuhalten? Im Policy Paper „Breaking the Chain – Konzernmacht und Big-Data-Plattformen im globalen Ernährungssystem“ setzt sich Pat Mooney, Träger des Alternativen Nobelpreises, kritisch mit der Digitalisierung in der Landwirtschaft auseinander. Er analysiert, wer die zentralen Akteure im Digitalisierungsgeschäft sind und beleuchtet die Bedeutung der Digitalisierung für kleinbäuerliche Erzeuger*innen und Arbeit*innen in Landwirtschaft und Nahrungsmittelindustrie weltweit. Neue Technologien versprechen Effizienzsteigerungen und Nachhaltigkeit bei der Erzeugung. Dabei geht es im Kern um das massenhafte Sammeln und Auswerten von Hof-, Anbau- und Verbraucher*innendaten. Agrarkonzerne wie Bayer und Deere, aber auch Internetkonzerne wie Amazon und Google sind längst dabei, sich die Hoheit über die Digitalisierung der Landwirtschaft anzueignen. Durch Fusionsprozesse konsolidieren sie ihre Dominanz nicht nur in einem Sektor, sondern vertikal entlang mehrerer Schnittstellen der Lebensmittelkette. Ihre Bemühungen werden durch politische Entscheidungsträger*innen in Deutschland und anderswo unterstützt, die vor allem die Vorteile der Digitalisierung betonen und Investitionshemmnisse aus dem Weg räumen wollen. Mooney zeigt die problematischen Auswirkungen dieser Tendenzen ebenso wie die Grenzen der Digitalisierung auf und diskutiert, inwieweit die Digitalisierung für den Umbau hin zu einer sozial-ökologisch gerechten Landwirtschaft genutzt werden könnte. Die Studie „Breaking the Chain – Konzernmacht und Big-Data-Plattformen im globalen Ernährungssystem“ ist eine gemeinsame Publikation von ETC Group, GLOCON, INKOTA und der Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.

This paper empirically investigates the role of long-term inflation expectations for the monetary transmission mechanism. In contrast to earlier studies, we confirm that U.S. long-term inflation expectations respond significantly to a monetary policy shock. In line with a re-anchoring channel of monetary policy, we find that long-term inflation expectations play an important role for the transmission of monetary policy shocks to the rate of inflation. Our results are robust with respect to the identification strategy and alternative monetary policy indicators applied during the zero lower bound period.

La economía del desarrollo es la rama de la economía con la que nace el estudio moderno de la economía como ciencia. Adam Smith, considerado por muchos como el padre de la economía, formuló preguntas en el siglo XVIIIque nunca han dejado de interesar a las economistas. Las preguntas de Smith más relevantes para la economía del desarrollo son las relacionadas a las causas de la riqueza de las naciones y las políticas que la fomentan. Este curso introductorio ofrece una visión general de los principales temas de la economía del desarrollo. El carácter introductorio del curso permite que participen en él estudiantes de otras disciplinas distintas de la economía.El curso consta de cinco sesiones. Cada sesión dura dos horas académicas. Las clases se llevan a cabo usando un programa de reuniones virtuales (p. ej. Webex, Zoom, etc.) y un sistema de gestión de aprendizaje (p. ej. Blackboard, Moodle, etc.). Antes de la primera clase en el sistema de gestión de aprendizaje se comparten la sumilla y las lecturas obligatorias y sugeridas para que las estudiantes las puedan tener leídas antes de la clase. También se crea un foro de discusión para llevar a cabo una ronda virtual de presentación e intereses. En ella se presenta primero el facilitador del curso y éste les pide a los estudiantes que se presenten y escriban sobre sus intereses particulares en torno al tema.Al comenzar cada clase se comparte un enlace en el programa de reuniones virtuales con un video de la presentación magistral sobre el tema de la sesión. Luego de visto el video, la facilitadora organiza salas para grupos pequeños en el programa de reuniones virtuales con el fin de que las estudiantes respondan preguntas cuyas respuestas serán comentadas en la sesión plenaria luego de que los grupos hayan respondido las preguntas. El facilitador visita cada grupo para ayudar a las participantes a responder las preguntas. En la sesión plenaria voluntarios de cada grupo comparten sus respuestas y la facilitadora modera la discusión. Cada sesión termina con un comentario final dado por el facilitador

Populism has fatally weakened the world’s ability to respond to COVID-19, by undermining the capacity of the structures and mechanisms of international law to address the pandemic. The pandemic has exposed as a fallacy a key tenet of populism – to protect the ‘people’ of a nation from external forces, including international law. In fact international law, through the principle of self-determination, enshrines the ability of peoples to determine their own political organization. But this does not preclude agreement at the international level on matters of common interest to humanity as a whole that require community action. The prevention of infectious disease is just such a case, which states have long agreed could not remain solely the preserve of national polities, but requires a common international response. This paper, placing the current crisis in light of the development of international health law, critically examines the response of key populist governments to COVID-19 in order to address the larger issue of the implications of populism for the fate of international law.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has adopted a mixture of conventional and unconventional tools in order to achieve its mandate of price stability in the current low-inflation, low-interest-rate scenario. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing a taxonomy of the ECB’s policy toolkit and by evaluating its implications on price stability and the anchoring of inflation expectations. I carry out my analysis based on a high-frequency identification and the estimation of a large Bayesian Vector Autoregression. I find evidence of re-anchored expectations as response to quantitative easing and forward guidance, i.e. forecasters revise their long-run expectations upwards. Consequently, inflation increases, which stresses the crucial role of expectations for the transmission of monetary policy.

Research on the cleavage between cosmopolitans and communitarians has, so far, not focused on distinction practices between the two groups, which are, however, an important aspect of inter-group conflicts. Based on data from a web-based factorial survey experiment with students living in Berlin, this study examined the signaling value that different lifestyle characteristics have for the cosmopolitans, as well as the impact these characteristics have on their willingness to socially engage with other people. The results show that cosmopolitans interpret lifestyle characteristics as signals to categorize others as either cosmopolitan or communitarian and that they rather interact with other people who have a cosmopolitan lifestyle than with people who do not. Additionally, cosmopolitans interpret the lifestyle characterictics more as signals of political attitudes than as signals of social class positions. In conclusion, their lifestyle enables cosmopolitans to identify group affiliations, to distinguish themselves from the communitarians, and to draw a social boundary between the two groups.

This paper develops a two-step inference procedure to test for a local one-for-one relation of contemporaneous jumps in high-frequency financial data corrupted by market microstructure noise. The first step develops a new bivariate Lee-Mykland jump test for pre-averaged, intra-day returns. If a jump is detected in at least one of the two assets, then the second step tests for equal jump sizes. We apply the test procedure to pairs of nominal and inflationindexed government bond yields at monetary policy announcements in the U.S., U.K., and Euro Area. The analysis provides new high-frequency evidence about the anchoring of inflation expectations and central banks’ ability to push a measure of inflation expectations towards their inflation target.

The Vehicle Scheduling Problem (VSP) is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem arising for bus companies in public transport. The objective is to cover a given set of timetabled trips by a set of buses at minimum costs. The Electric Vehicle Scheduling Problem (E-VSP) complicates traditional bus scheduling by considering electric buses with limited driving ranges. To compensate these limitations, detours to charging stations become necessary for charging the vehicle batteries during operations. To save costs, the charging stations must be located within the road network in such a way that required deadhead trips are as short as possible or even redundant. For solving the traditional VSP, a variety of solution approaches exist capable of solving even real-world instances with large networks and timetables to optimality. In contrast, the problem complexity increases significantly when considering limited ranges and chargings of the batteries. For this reason, there mainly exist solution approaches for the E-VSP which are based von heuristic procedures as exact methods do not provide solutions within a reasonable time. In this paper, we present a literature review of solution approaches for scheduling electric vehicles in public transport and location planning of charging stations. Since existing work differ in addition to the solution methodology also in the mapping of electric vehicles' technical aspects, we pay particular attention to these characteristics. To conclude, we provide a perspective for potential further research.

Temporary employees rank lower than permanent employees on various measures of mental and physical health, including well-being. In parallel, much research has shown that the relationship between age and well-being traces an approximate U-shape, with a nadir in midlife. Temporary employment may well have different associations with well-being across the lifespan, likely harming people in midlife more than at the start of their working lives. Using over twenty years of the German Socio-economic panel (SOEP), this investigation considers the relationship between temporary employment, age and well-being. In doing so, it both sheds new light on the relationship between temporary employment and well-being, and explores a reason for the oft-found U-shaped relationship between age and well-being. The results show that temporary employment deepens the U-shape in midlife, and that this result holds when many socioeconomic factors as well as the industry, region, cohort, personality, employment security and job worries are taken into account. Furthermore, the investigation considers transitions between permanent and temporary employment and uses these to assess causation and selection.

Die Pfadabhängigkeitstheorie hat seit ihrer Entwicklung eine immense Erweiterung ihres Anwendungsgebietes erfahren. Mitte der 80er Jahre noch zur Erklärung von Sonderphänomenen in der neoklassischen Ökonomie erfunden, hat sich die Theorie inzwischen zu einem über die Wirtschaftswissenschaften hinausgehenden Ansatz zur Erklärung der Dialektik von Kontinuität und Wandel auch in der Zukunftsforschung etabliert. Dabei ist jedoch die konzeptionelle Weiterentwicklung der Theorie zu großen Teilen auf der Strecke geblieben – die Differenziertheit der Theorie wird ihren komplexen Anwendungsgebieten nicht gerecht. Auch ist keine klare Linie zu erkennen, dass sich spätere Autor*Innen auf frühere beziehen und deren Beiträge und Kritik nutzen. Diese Arbeit ist der Versuch einer Aufarbeitung. Dafür werden die Beiträge der deutschsprachigen Diskussion zur Theorie gesichtet, geordnet und kritisiert, um anschließend einen eigenen Beitrag anzuschließen. In Anlehnung an Jürgen Beyer, der in seiner Publikation „Pfadabhängigkeit ist nicht gleich Pfadabhängigkeit!“ vorschlägt, die stabilitätssichernden Effekte der Theorie zu differenzieren, wird vorgeschlagen, auch die Pfade und deren Pfadzusammenhänge zu differenzieren. Dafür wird das Vokabular von drei weiteren Konzepten fruchtbar gemacht, die sich mit Wandel auseinandersetzen: die Causal Layered Analysis von Sohail Inayatullah, die Multi-Level-Perspective nach Frank Geels und die longue durée von Fernand Braudel. Die Arbeit schließt mit ersten Anwendungsexperimenten der neu sortierten und differenzierten Pfadabhängigkeitstheorie.