Working Paper
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The Unintended Consequences of Pandemic Lockdowns: Evidence on Domestic Violence in Italy
(2024)Center for Law & Economics Working Paper SeriesThis study examines the effects of Italy’s COVID-19 tiered lockdown system on domestic violence. The policy implemented categorizes regions into different weekly risk levels, imposing corresponding mobility restrictions—the higher the risk, the greater the constraints on mobility outside the home. Leveraging this setting, we employ a difference-in-differences approach with staggered treatment adoption and heterogeneous treatment effects ...Working Paper -
The second coefficient of the Alexander polynomial as a satellite obstruction
(2024)arXivA set P of links is introduced, containing positive braid links as well as arborescent positive Hopf plumbings. Inspired by work of Ito, it is shown that for links in P, the leading and the second coefficient of the Alexander polynomial have opposite sign. It follows that certain satellite links, such as (n,1)-cables, are not in P.Working Paper -
A new concordance homomorphism from Khovanov homology
(2024)The universal Khovanov chain complex of a knot modulo an appropriate equivalence relation is shown to yield a homomorphism on the smooth concordance group, which is strictly stronger than all Rasmussen invariants over fields of different characteristics combined.Working Paper -
The impact of decreasing horizontal grid spacing on the simulation of the mountain boundary layer in the hectometric range
(2024)arXivThe horizontal grid spacing of numerical weather prediction models keeps decreasing towards the hectometric range. We perform limited-area simulations with the ICON model across horizontal grid spacings (1 km, 500 m, 250 m, 125 m) in the Inn Valley, Austria, and evaluate the model with observations from the CROSSINN measurement campaign. This allows us to investigate whether increasing the horizontal resolution automatically improves the ...Working Paper -
Text-image Alignment for Diffusion-based Perception
(2023)arXivDiffusion models are generative models with impressive text-to-image synthesis capabilities and have spurred a new wave of creative methods for classical machine learning tasks. However, the best way to harness the perceptual knowledge of these generative models for visual tasks is still an open question. Specifically, it is unclear how to use the prompting interface when applying diffusion backbones to vision tasks. We find that automatically ...Working Paper -
On-chip quantum interference between independent lithium niobate-on-insulator photon-pair sources
(2024)arXivGenerating and interfering non-classical states of light is fundamental to optical quantum in formation science and technology. Quantum photonic integrated circuits provide one pathway to wards scalability by combining nonlinear sources of non-classical light and programmable circuits in centimeter-scale devices. The key requirements for quantum applications include efficient genera tion of indistinguishable photon-pairs and high-visibility ...Working Paper -
Top-funded digital health companies offering lifestyle interventions for dementia prevention: Company overview and evidence analysis
(2024)medRxivBackground and objectiveDementia prevention has been recognized as a top priority by public health authorities due to the lack of disease modifying treatments. In this regard, digital dementia-preventive lifestyle services (DDLS) emerge as potentially pivotal services, aiming to address modifiable risk factors on a large scale. This study aims to identify the top-funded companies offering DDLS globally and evaluate their clinical evidence ...Working Paper -
Asgard archaea modulate potential methanogenesis substrates in wetland soil
(2023)bioRxivThe roles of Asgard archaea in eukaryogenesis and marine biogeochemical cycles are well studied, yet their contributions in soil ecosystems are unknown. Of particular interest are Asgard archaeal contributions to methane cycling in wetland soils. To investigate this, we reconstructed two complete genomes for soil-associated Atabeyarchaeia, a new Asgard lineage, and the first complete genome of Freyarchaeia, and defined their metabolism ...Working Paper -
Effect of the 2022 summer drought across forest types in Europe
(2024)EGUsphereForests in Europe experienced record-breaking dry conditions during the 2022 summer. The direction in which various forest types respond to climate extremes during their growing season is contingent upon an array of internal and external factors. These factors include the extent and severity of the extreme conditions and the tree ecophysiological characteristics adapted to environmental cues, which exhibit significant regional variations. ...Working Paper -
Increasing public support for climate policy: Research needs, questions, and challenges around politically influenceable acceptability factors
(2022)Oeko-Institut Working PaperAmbitious climate policy needs a mix of instruments, from relatively soft and supportive pull measures to more intervening and demanding push measures. Given that the latter often receive relatively low public support, especially when targeting consumers’ everyday life, we need to know more about how to increase their acceptability. We argue that existing research has focused on factors that explain relatively stable differences in climate ...Working Paper -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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