Partnerships and new rural governance for reacting to demographic change in rural regions in Germany

Peripheral rural areas are particularly affected by demographic changes. The research question is: how the involved rural actors interact with each other to react to the resulting challenges, and why does this mode of interaction come about? The contribution presents empirical data from a survey and three case studies conducted in 2008 and 2009. The results indicate the coincidence of cooperation and unilateral action. Regional partnership is limited and every actor first tries to solve his problems by himself, and where necessary with a beggar-thy-neighbour policy. Rural actors engage in cooperation most notably to acquire funding, to exchange experiences, to prepare concepts and to conduct analyses. They develop and implement their projects, however, predominantly unilaterally.rural governance, rural development, regional cooperation, actor-centred institutionalism, Community/Rural/Urban Development, R58,

Arbitrage in Energy Markets: Competing in the Incumbent's Shadow

This paper studies the welfare implications of using market mechanisms to allocate transmission capacity in recently liberalized electricity markets. It questions whether access to this essential facility should be traded on a market, or whether the incumbent should retain exclusive usage rights. We show that granting exclusive use to the incumbent might be optimal, if the capacity of the essential facility is small and the incumbent can reduce production costs by taking advantage of interregional production-cost differences. This result counters the intuition that arbitrage will improve the social surplus when there is no output contraction. The reason is that when competition is imperfect, arbitrage might reduce production efficiency. We advise policymakers to introduce market mechanisms for the allocation of transmission capacity only if sufficient investment in the network is ensured or if the market power of the incumbent is broken in at least one of the markets in which it is active.Arbitrage;electricity sector;price discrimination

Minimal supersolutions of convex BSDEs

We study the nonlinear operator of mapping the terminal value $\xi$ to the corresponding minimal supersolution of a backward stochastic differential equation with the generator being monotone in $y$, convex in $z$, jointly lower semicontinuous and bounded below by an affine function of the control variable $z$. We show existence, uniqueness, monotone convergence, Fatou's lemma and lower semicontinuity of this operator. We provide a comparison principle for minimal supersolutions of BSDEs.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOP834 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

What is the strategic value of investments in alternative local energy supply?

This paper studies strategic incentives to invest in electricity generation capacity using a local fuel like renewables or coal. It shows that investing in this capacity, even if not used, improves the bargaining position of a power producing firm that also imports another fuel such as gas. When several importers are considered, the paper finds that investment has a positive strategic effect on all other importers’ bargaining position. A government energy policy that forces utilities to invest in capacity based on particular fuels can be justified not only for environmental but also for strategic reasons.