Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School
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02/2023
The Dual Nature of Multilateral Development Banks: Balancing Development and Financial Logics
(2023)
This Element offers a novel, highly relevant perspective towards Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), which are development and financial organizations at the same time. Based on the elaborate institutional logics perspective borrowed from organizational sociology, it uncovers the complex trade-offs between financial and development pressures faced by MDBs and explains variation in organizational responses thereto across types of MDBs. The argument is tested with an original dataset using Data Envelopment Analysis to explain variation in response patterns across MDBs. The analysis shows that lending to the private sector as well as being predominantly owned by borrowing members increase MDBs' emphasis on the financial at the expense of the development nature. Thereby, this Element provides unique insights into MDBs' responses to their dual nature and significantly advances our understanding of MDB lending operations, drawing attention to the complexities involved in the unique MDB business model.
12/2022
This thesis discusses the role of the economic incentives and policies required to build energy systems that are compatible with achieving the goal of net-zero carbon emissions. I try to look beyond the techno-centric solutions that focus on new electricity generation technologies to explore how the way we consume and supply energy may be changed to facilitate the energy transition. The first paper of this cumulative thesis identifies packages of demand-side policy interventions in household energy consumption that can deliver an immediate reduction in carbon emissions. The second paper quantifies the relationship between electricity demand and prices in electricity markets using an instrumental variable approach. This relationship can provide the basis for designing policies that use electricity demand as a tool for integrating high shares of renewable energy in the power system. Following the theme of renewable energy integration, the third paper looks at the policies for influencing electricity demand from agricultural consumers in developing countries to increase the share of solar and wind while lowering the associated integration costs. And the last paper focuses on the need for policy instruments that determine the spatial allocation of renewable energy. The four papers together highlight that using the right economic incentives and policies, we can foster flexibility in both energy demand and supply that reduces the reliance on technological innovation and revolution for achieving the transformation to a low carbon energy system.
10/2022
This cumulative dissertation advances management scholarship by studying the novel phenomenon of Blockchain organizing. Blockchain is an emerging technology that facilitates the maintenance of data across networks of computers, as opposed to more traditional central servers. These distributed data maintenance capabilities may have wide-ranging consequences. Ever since Blockchain’s inception in 2008, a discourse identifying this technology as an enabler of radically new and decentralized modes of collective and societal coordination has gained traction. “Blockchain organizing” refers to practices in which such Blockchain technology artefacts are being developed, implemented, and/or utilized by organizations.
Studying these practices presents a unique opportunity to further management scholarship; particularly subjective time research following the neo-institutional tradition. Blockchain is not only an emerging technology associated with significant future expectations, but further a meta-organizational technology whose very raison d'être is the transformation of entrenched organizational structures. When organizational actors develop, implement, and/or utilize Blockchain technology, bureaucratic ways of organizing that have been established in the past and continue to be legitimized in the present may become reevaluated in light of bold visions for an organizational and societal future that looks radically different.
The dissertation at hand utilizes this Blockchain context as an exemplary case to develop theory on how transformative future visions and expectations associated with emerging technologies may become instantiated within the present, and conceptualizes this phenomenon as “present-future convergence”. Developed based on a field-level pilot study that led to an 18-month ethnographic engagement with one Blockchain start-up, the three papers gathered in the dissertation utilize an interpretivist approach to explain how present-future convergence is rooted in conjoined processes of intra- and inter-subjective temporal experience. Furthermore, the papers highlight the counterintuitive consequences that present-future convergence may have for processes of technological, organizational, and societal change. In doing so, the dissertation opens promising research avenues at the intersection of temporality, performativity, and sociomateriality, and contributes to scholarly understanding of Blockchain organizing.
Practically speaking, the dissertation helps answer the question of how actors may “pull” the future into the present to realize transformative future visions like those associated with emerging technologies.
08/2022
Governments use regulation to affect the behavior of market participants such that welfare is maximized. Good regulation in the electricity sector aims to achieve an affordable, sustainable, and secure supply of electricity. However, the energy transition fundamentally changes the way electrical energy is produced and consumed. Consequently, market rules and regulatory interventions need to be adjusted to cope with these new political targets, technological innovations, and societal trends.
This cumulative dissertation contributes to the academic literature on regulatory incentives in the electricity sector with four scientific articles. At the core of this dissertation are incentives for participants of the electricity market that result from the market design and other regulatory interventions. I study how such incentives can be designed to minimize the cost of expanding and operating the transmission network. The transmission system is confronted with several new challenges resulting from the energy transition, including an increasing distance between generators and consumers, power flows that quickly change over time, and declining share of dispatchable generators that complicates frequency stability.
The first three articles of this dissertation study incentives for market participants to account for the cost of operating and expanding the transmission network in their investment and dispatch decisions. The first article introduces a conceptual framework for categorizing and analyzing locational signals that result from the market design and from other regulatory interventions. It classifies, quantifies, and discusses locational instruments in twelve jurisdictions. It finds that all reviewed systems apply regulatory locational instruments, and many systems even combine multiple instruments. Only few instruments result in economic incentives that are strong enough to affect investment decisions. The second article focuses on one key market design: nodal pricing. It identifies and assesses the main arguments against the concept of nodal pricing based on the experience made in US power markets. It shows that most of the perceived drawbacks of the concept in the European debate are misconceived and can be sufficiently addressed as it is done in systems that already implemented a nodal market. The third article studies the long-run effects of optimal administratively determined locational signals. To do so, it introduces a complementary power market model. Applying the model to a sample case study reveals characteristics of such signals and highlights their potential welfare gains.
The fourth article is dedicated to the balancing mechanism, which maintains the grid frequency by balancing the feed-in of electricity into the network and its withdrawal. This is another source of cost that arise in the transmission system. The article analyses the economic incentives resulting from the design of the balancing mechanism. It quantifies the price response of balancing responsible parties to the imbalance price and finds a significant effect. This finding is politically delicate because such a price responsiveness is forbidden by the regulator.
With these four articles, the dissertation provides insights how the regulator can affect the behavior of market participants through economic incentives, which is of interest for researchers and policy makers alike. It adds to the literature by proposing new frameworks and models, and by drawing from experiences in other jurisdictions. Thereby, it contributes to adapting the regulation of the power sector in times of the energy transition.
06/2022
In electricity systems, supply traditionally follows demand. Consequently, economists have focused on analyzing supply while assuming perfectly inelastic demand. Demand flexibility, if at all, occurred in deterministic patterns, such as during peak and off-peak periods, incentivized by static time-of-use tariffs. Nowadays, the role of electricity demand is changing fundamentally: growing shares of fluctuating wind and solar energy require flexibility in a larger quantity and on a stochastic basis; increasing loads of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and hydrogen electrolyzers could provide flexibility through battery, thermal, and gas storage; and the introduction of smart meters enables dynamic real-time tariffs and an automated response of distributed loads.
This cumulative dissertation contributes to the economic understanding of flexible electricity demand with five scientific articles. Article 1 starts with reviewing the role of electrification in decarbonization scenarios for heating and road transport in Germany. The article finds that decarbonization drives electrification, leading to an increase in electricity demand by a factor of roughly two. Direct and indirect electrification options are contrasted with respect to their distinct flexibility potential.
Articles 2 and 3 explore the implications of decentralized electric heat pumps and centralized electrolytic hydrogen, respectively, for the market value of renewables. Both use the same numerical electricity market model. Article 2 finds that the volatility of the heat pump’s electricity demand challenges the electricity system, which becomes apparent in increasing load cost. A flexible operation of heat pumps may reduce this challenge, but potential benefits for the market value of wind energy are minor. By contrast, Article 3 shows that hydrogen electrolyzers have the potential to stabilize renewable market values at high renewable market shares effectively and permanently, because additional renewable supply can trigger investment in additional hydrogen electrolyzers with additional demand.
Articles 4 and 5 investigate the flexibility of the current electricity demand using econometric models with instrumental variables. Article 4 reveals that, at an hourly temporal resolution, the aggregated electricity demand in Germany is indeed price-elastic; it decreases by 70 MW for every € 1 per MWh increase in the day-ahead wholesale price. Article 5 finds that demand is also price-responsive in the very short term: the demand for imbalance energy responds to the imbalance price—despite the legal obligation in Germany to minimize imbalances independent of prices.
06/2021
01/2021
The Laval Quartet rulings of the CJEU have become an indispensable reference in every discussion on the social dimension of the European integration process over the past decade. Becoming a synonym for the subordination of labour rights and social goals to market freedoms, the rulings have raised different questions, the most pressing one being about the relationship between the economic and the social sphere of the EU as an emerging polity. The dissertation enquires into the question to what extent that relationship has been reconfigured in the aftermath of the Quartet rulings.
Starting with the rulings themselves through a law in context approach, the dissertation studied a segment of the aftermath in the period following the rulings (2008-2019). While the aftermath has played out at various levels of EU’s multi-level governance structure, this study focuses on the supranational macro-level, examining the development of the subsequent CJEU case law and the EU-level political responses.
The thesis makes the argument that due to the countermovement that the rulings have quickly triggered at EU and Member State level, a political struggle over the social in the EU has emerged, demonstrating the difficulty of conceiving of the EU as a common social space in conditions of diversity, a strong core-periphery division and governance structures dominated by market rationality.
Particularly the developments in the field of posting of workers, starting with the Quartet and ending with the Revised Posted Workers Directive, reveal three important insights for the integration process more broadly. First, the existing material inequality and differences in economic development among Member States in enlarged EU, of which the Quartet was an early symptom, have buttressed the European regulatory space as a space of conflict between the core and the peripheries. Second, resolving core-periphery conflicts has distributional consequences, which are particularly visible in the context of labour and social questions. Resolving such conflicts requires an EU common conception of (social) justice, which appears particularly difficult to conceive of in the core-periphery constellation. Third, progressive social solutions mostly remain foreclosed, as in both cases, at the Court as well as in the political realm, these are mostly contested within a framework dominated by market rationality.
04/2020
This dissertation examines employee work motivations, attitudes, and outcomes within the public sector drawing upon quantitative cross-country survey data. It challenges the dominant idea that public service motivation (PSM) is the only form of work motivation that matters for public servants by examining PSM against traditional intrinsic and extrinsic work motivation based on the framework of self-determination theory (SDT). It links these motivation types to different employee outcomes such as job satisfaction, ethics, and employee engagement while also taking into consideration stress in the workplace. It then shifts focus to examine interpersonal relationships at the organisational level through the concept of organizational social capital (OSC) and how management instruments support or impede OSC. This is relevant as it introduces conceptual and empirical differentiation between PSM and SDT, which is limited, or conflated, in PSM research. Additionally, understanding how management tools are linked to social capital provides a new angle for assessing management interventions and how they support or hinder the values, trust, and support within organisations. This research analyses civil service perceptions and attitudes across Europe and is presented in the form of four distinct papers. Overall findings show that PSM and SDT work motivation are different based on temporal focus, motivation needs, and measurement strategies and their individual utility differs depending on what type of attitude and outcome is measured. SDT appears to be more strongly related to job-related outcomes, while PSM is more strongly related to attitudes associated with job purpose. However, more nuanced findings suggest that different motivations may compensate for the failings of another and that they behave differently in different contexts and different stressors. Results also show that management tools focusing on interpersonal interactions are associated with positive social capital and can deter the impact of political interference. This dissertation contributes to the theoretical and empirical differentiation between PSM and SDT work motivation, providing evidence to support the fact that motivation types are context-specific and different motivations matter in evoking specific attitudes and behaviours. Consequently, future research should identify which motivations are most appropriate for which line of study and management actions should take this into consideration when designing institutional policies and interventions.
07/2019
EU Police Cooperation (1976 - 2016). State Preferences in the Context of Differentiated Integration
(2019)
European internal security has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Various incidents across EU Member States have demonstrated the transnationalisation of terrorism and organised crime as well as the need to work together to safeguard security in a progressively borderless Europe. Governments and citizens have consistently called for a growing role of the EU and coordinating at this level. In this light, it appears striking that different cooperation initiatives continue to mushroom inside and outside the EU framework. Their parallel emergence duplicates efforts at best but can also obstruct information exchange and produce security failures. This dissertation sets out to investigate why Member States acknowledge the benefits of integration, yet advance differentiation as well.
Concretely, it studies the formation of state preferences in the still largely intergovernmental field of EU police cooperation. It asks which factors shape government positions and how they drive Member States to favour integration. In particular, the influence of cross-country interdependencies, politicisation and policy entrepreneurship might help explain processes of integration and differentiation in this policy area. Their relative importance as drivers of state preferences is studied across the institutional development of EU police cooperation between 1976 and 2016. The analysis is organised around four ‘milestones’ in the integration of this field: 1) the 1976 intergovernmental Trevi Group; 2) the 1995 Europol Convention establishing the European Police Office (Europol); (3) the 2009 Europol Council Decision establishing Europol as official EU agency; and (4) the 2016 Europol Regulation.
This dissertation finds that interdependencies in the fight against common threats mattered most as driver of state integration preferences in the early stages of European police cooperation. More recently, supranational policy entrepreneurship has emerged as key influence of pro-integration attitudes among Member States and can be expected to grow in importance. Politicisation, against it, provides windows of opportunity to this end and acts rather as amplifier of integration pressure from interdependencies and policy entrepreneurs. In sum, the asymmetrical effects of all three drivers explains the formation of diverging governmental attitudes towards integration and can thus help account for the persistence of parallel processes of differentiation and integration.