Working Papers/Reports
Recent Submissions
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The importance of tipping points for sustainable development
(2024)Economics Working Paper SeriesSolving major sustainability problems such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity requires overcoming a fundamental dilemma: on the one hand, central decisions on the realignment of the economy and society should be quick and far-reaching, on the other hand, actual decision-makers are strongly oriented towards established structures, which entail great inertia and path dependencies. As a result, expectations and reality are often ...Working Paper -
How much should public transport services be expanded, and who should pay?
(2024)Arbeitsberichte Verkehrs- und RaumplanungThe twin challenge of increasing capacity to accommodate growing travel demand while simultaneously decarbonizing the transport sector places enormous pressure on public transport (PT) systems globally. Arguably the most fundamental policy choice and trade-off in designing and operating PT systems in the coming years will be service levels versus cost implications. On the presumption that public (citizen and consumer) opinion is crucial ...Working Paper -
Seeing and Hearing is Believing: The Role of Audiovisual Communication in Shaping Inflation Expectations
(2024)Center for Law & Economics Working Paper SeriesThis paper presents novel causal evidence on the relationship between various communication channels employed by central banks and households’ expectations about future inflation. In a pre registered randomized survey experiment administered in 2022, we examine adjustment of inflation expectations when confronted with a press conference statement by the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) articulating the bank’s commitment to a ...Working Paper -
The Court Speaks, But Who Listens? Automated Compliance Review of the GDPR
(2024)Center for Law & Economics Working Paper SeriesWith the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, the European Union put itself at the forefront of protecting privacy law world-wide. Under the GDPR, data protection agencies may impose fines up to 4% of a firm’s annual worldwide turnover. The largest fines actually imposed now surpass one billion Euro. Still, anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that many firms violate the GDPR on a regular basis. This could ...Working Paper -
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Boosting Sluggish Climate Policy: Endogenous Substitution, Learning, and Energy Efficiency Improvements
(2024)Economics Working Paper SeriesThere is widespread concern that climate policy is moving too slowly and that decarbonization of economic development is coming too late for effective climate protection. We analyze three different effects that emerge endogenously during decarbonization and amplify current policies: growing substitutability of dirty inputs with clean inputs, learning and scale effects in new renewables, and efficiency im provements in the application of ...Working Paper -
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Compound soil and atmospheric drought events and CO2 fluxes of a mixed deciduous forest: Occurrence, impact, and temporal contribution of main drivers
(2024)EGUsphereWith global warming, forests are facing an increased exposure to compound soil and atmospheric drought (CSAD) events, characterized by low soil water content (SWC) and high vapor pressure deficit (VPD). Such CSAD events trigger responses in both ecosystem and forest floor CO2 fluxes, of which we know little about. In this study, we used multi-year daily and daytime above canopy (18 years; 2005–2022) and daily forest floor (five years; ...Working Paper -
Divergent responses of evergreen needle-leaf forests in Europe to the 2020 warm winter
(2024)EGUsphereRelative to drought and heat waves, the effect of winter warming on forest CO2 fluxes during the dormant season has less been investigated, despite its relevance for net CO2 uptake in colder regions with higher carbon content in soils. Our objective was to test the effect of the exceptionally warm winter in 2020 on the winter CO2 budget of cold-adapted evergreen needle-leaf forests across Europe, and identify the contribution of soil and ...Working Paper -
PipeRAG: Fast Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Algorithm-System Co-design
(2024)Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can enhance the generation quality of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external token databases. However, retrievals from large databases can constitute a substantial portion of the overall generation time, particularly when retrievals are periodically performed to align the retrieved content with the latest states of generation. In this paper, we introduce PipeRAG, a novel algorithm-system ...Working Paper -
De-biasing electric vehicle adoption with personalized nudging
(2024)Economics Working Paper SeriesReplacing combustion engine vehicles with battery electric vehicles (BEV) is essential to achieving climate objectives and advancing sustainable transportation, aligning with the United Nations Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. In this project, we identify three perception biases linked to EV adoption and address them with personalized non-monetary information treatments to increase the adoption of BEVs among owners of internal ...Working Paper -
Wavelet compressed, modified Hilbert transform in the space-time discretization of the heat equation
(2024)SAM Research ReportOn a finite time interval \((0,T)\), we consider the multiresolution Galerkin discretization of a modified Hilbert transform \((H_T)\) which arises in the space-time Galerkin discretization of the linear diffusion equation. To this end, we design spline-wavelet systems in \((0,T)\) consisting of piecewise polynomials of degree \(\geq 1\) with sufficiently many vanishing moments which constitute Riesz bases in the Sobolev spaces \( ...Report -
Exponential Expressivity of ReLU^k Neural Networks on Gevrey Classes with Point Singularities
(2024)SAM Research ReportWe analyze deep Neural Network emulation rates of smooth functions with point singularities in bounded, polytopal domains \(\mathrm{D} \subset \mathbb{R}^d\), \(d=2,3\). We prove exponential emulation rates in Sobolev spaces in terms of the number of neurons and in terms of the number of nonzero coefficients for Gevrey-regular solution classes defined in terms of weighted Sobolev scales in \(\mathrm{D}\), comprising the countably-normed ...Report -
Time-dependent electromagnetic scattering from dispersive materials
(2024)SAM Research ReportThis paper studies time-dependent electromagnetic scattering from metamaterials that are described by dispersive material laws. We consider the numerical treatment of a scattering problem in which a dispersive material law, for a causal and passive homogeneous material, determines the wave-material interaction in the scatterer. The resulting problem is nonlocal in time inside the scatterer and is posed on an unbounded domain. Well-posedness ...Report -
Banach lattices with upper p-estimates: Free and injective objects
(2024)SAM Research ReportWe study the free Banach lattice FBL(p,∞)[E] with upper p-estimates generated by a Banach space E. Using a classical result of Pisier on factorization through Lp,∞(μ) together with a finite dimensional reduction, it is shown that the spaces ℓp,∞(n) witness the universal property of FBL(p,∞)[E] isomorphically. As a consequence, we obtain a functional representation for FBL(p,∞)[E], answering a previously open question. More generally, our ...Report -
Trend Analysis Civil Protection 2035 Uncertainties, Challenges and Opportunities
(2024)CSS Risk and Resilience ReportsThis report is the third reiteration in an ongoing series dedicated to identifying and examining evolving trends relevant for civil protection. It offers an overview of relevant trends that are expected to have a substantial impact on Switzerland and its civil protection system over the next five to ten years. The report is part of the Federal Office of Civil Protection’s (FOCP) initiative to strengthen horizon scanning capabilities in ...Report -
The Strategic Value of Data Sharing in Interdependent Markets
(2024)Large, generalist, technology firms—so-called “big-tech” firms—powerful in their primary market, routinely enter secondary markets consisting of specialist firms. Naturally, one might expect a specialist firm to be fiercely protective of its data as a way to maintain its market position in the secondary market. Counter to this intuition, we demonstrate that a specialist firm willingly shares its market data with an intruding tech generalist. ...Working Paper