Dokument: Three Essays in Applied Economics - Empirical Analyses of Renewable Energies & the Relationship between Competitive Sports and Job Success
| Titel: | Three Essays in Applied Economics - Empirical Analyses of Renewable Energies & the Relationship between Competitive Sports and Job Success | |||||||
| URL für Lesezeichen: | https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=42200 | |||||||
| URN (NBN): | urn:nbn:de:hbz:061-20170427-130905-3 | |||||||
| Kollektion: | Dissertationen | |||||||
| Sprache: | Englisch | |||||||
| Dokumententyp: | Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten » Dissertation | |||||||
| Medientyp: | Text | |||||||
| Autor: | Giessing, Leonie [Autor] | |||||||
| Dateien: |
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| Beitragende: | Prof. Dr. Haucap, Justus [Gutachter] Prof. Dr. Heimeshoff, Ulrich [Gutachter] | |||||||
| Dewey Dezimal-Klassifikation: | 300 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie » 330 Wirtschaft | |||||||
| Beschreibung: | This dissertation consists of three essays in empirical economics focusing on two different fields, i.e. energy economics and sports economics. The aim is to analyse current issues in the sectors
of renewable energy economics as well as sports economics at the interface of labour economics. Both fields are of a broader interest as they possess a societal component and, hence, are subject to political influence. The expansion of renewable energies for electricity generation is socially as well as politically desired and, therefore, often promoted by governmental financial support schemes and prioritized feed-in. This results in distortions to the market process of conventional power plants. Electricity generation by the so-called intermittent renewable energies, i.e. wind and solar PV, is weather-dependent and not demand-driven. It can be interpreted as an exogenous supply shock to the conventional generation. Conventional power plants, therefore, have to cover only the residual demand, which is subject to ever greater fluctuations. Power is usually provided by several conventional power plant types, i.e. base-, mid-merit and peak-load plants, that vary according to their fixed and variable costs. Thereby, they determine their generation pattern in accordance with demand. The increased feed-in by renewable energies places considerable demands on the conventional plant fleet. For example, a flexible back-up capacity has to be maintained, that is able to step in - even at short notice - when the intermittent technologies are unable to produce, yet is not in operation most of the year. These developments will have an impact on the future market design and security of supply. Regarding high-level competitive sports, a society usually longs for sporting heroes and it is argued that elite athletes and competitive sports play an important role in society. Many Germans enjoy a sense of pride if athletes of their country celebrate successes in international sporting events and winning medals in major sporting events motivates about a quarter of the German population to get active with sports themselves (Breuer and Hallmann, 2011). In addition, elite athletes are said to exert a positive influence on the citizens by establishing role models and communicating values such as fair play and team spirit. On the individual level, elite athletes are supposed to dispose of certain skills and personal characteristics such as commitment, discipline, self-confidence and a high stress tolerance, that are beneficial to a professional business career. However, participation in high-level competitive sports usually requires additional - financial - funding to the athletes, that is often provided by some governmental institution or foundation. Particularly since the Summer Olympic Games 2012 in London, there is an ongoing debate about the funding of elite sports. A large number of affected athletes are voicing their criticism about the current support scheme. They believe it to be inadequate in offering a continuously reliable financial support, which makes a simultaneous combination of vocational training and/or employment and top sports essential. At the same time, critics consider the funding as wasteful and question its general success (Drepper, 2012). When debating the scheme and level of elite sports funding not only the sporting performance should be taken into account, but also its long-term economic effects. From a methodological point of view, different empirical techniques are employed in each chapter of this dissertation. Different research questions impose different requirements on the data to be used in the respective analysis. In the following chapters, several empirical techniques have been applied to time series, panel as well as survey data. In Chapter 2, The Green Game Changer: An Empirical Assessment of the Effects of Intermittent Generation on the Merit Order (co-authored by Veit Böckers and Jürgen Rösch), the short-run impact of renewable energy sources on the merit order and the wholesale price in the Spanish wholesale market for electricity from 2008 to 2012 are estimated. The increased share of power generated by intermittent renewable energy sources (RES-E), i.e. wind and solar PV, leaves for the conventional generation technologies only the residual electricity demand to cover. In light of the different types of power plants as well as the altered requirements faced by the power plant fleet, this contribution empirically sheds light on the theoretical discussion which power plants are affected most by (intermittent) RES-E. Methodologically, the given structure of the merit-order is used to estimate a structural vector autoregressive (VAR) model. The coefficients of the technologies right in the merit-order of the respective technology are constrained to zero. It is argued that wind and solar production are exogenous to the system. As expected the effect is negative for the wholesale price and the produced quantities of most generation technologies. The estimated impact, however, is largest for mid-merit plants and the effect is also mainly driven by wind power. The analysis in Chapter 3, titled The Effect of Intermittent RES-E on the Conventional Power Plant Mix - An Empirical Analysis of 18 European Countries, is closely related to the second chapter. It aims at evaluating if and how the generation by intermittent RES-E has affected the conventional power plant mix. In contrast to the previous chapter, it focuses on the long-run effect by investigating the change in the shares of the capacities installed of the conventional generation technologies in response to the feed-in by intermittent generation. Fixed effects as well as fixed effects instrumental variable panel data regressions are conducted using a unique data set of 18 European OECD countries for the years 2000-2010. The results suggest that an increase in the share of RES-E generation decreases the shares of coal- and oil-fired power plants, while it has a positive effect on the share of gas-fired generation capacities. Chapter 4, titled The Effects of High-Level Competitive Sports Participation on Later Job Success (co-authored by Ralf Dewenter), addresses a completely different field of economics, i.e. sports economics. The income effect of participation in elite sports in the later working life of former elite athletes is estimated using an unique dataset of former German toplevel athletes. As little has been said about the impact of competitive elite sports on athletes' later job success after finishing their sporting career, we contribute to this strand of research by quantifying the average treatment effect using covariate nearest-neighbour matching. The treatment group consists of formerly top-level athletes and the data is acquired by a survey conducted with the support of the German Sports Aid Foundation (Stiftung Deutsche Sporthilfe). The control group of non-athletes is drawn from the GSOEP database. On average, former athletes receive higher incomes than similar non-athletes. Moreover, team sports athletes as well as male athletes realise significantly higher incomes. Comparing the income of former female athletes with male non-athletes, participating in elite sports closes the gender-wage gap. In the final chapter the main findings are summarized and suggestions for further research and possible extensions to the individual studies are discussed. | |||||||
| Lizenz: |  Urheberrechtsschutz | |||||||
| Fachbereich / Einrichtung: | Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät » Volkswirtschaftslehre | |||||||
| Dokument erstellt am: | 27.04.2017 | |||||||
| Dateien geändert am: | 27.04.2017 | |||||||
| Promotionsantrag am: | 09.06.2016 | |||||||
| Datum der Promotion: | 26.09.2016 |
