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Conditional yield skewness is an important summary statistic of the state of the economy. It exhibits pronounced variation over the business cycle and with the stance of monetary policy, and a tight relationship with the slope of the yield curve. Most importantly, variation in yield skewness has substantial forecasting power for future bond excess returns, high-frequency interest rate changes around FOMC announcements, and consensus survey forecast errors for the ten-year Treasury yield. The COVID pandemic did not disrupt these relations: historically high skewness correctly anticipated the run-up in long-term Treasury yields starting in late 2020. The connection between skewness, survey forecast errors, excess returns, and departures of yields from normality is consistent with a theoretical framework where one of the agents has biased beliefs.

The sample set includes 25 newly sampled sea-level index points based on fossil microatoll measurements from 5 islands in the Spermonde Archipelago, 21 fossl microatoll samples previously published by Mann et al., 2016 from two Islands in the same study region and 20 marine and terrestrial limiting points (e.g. corals, shells and loamy clay) and one further sea-level index point from a Mangrove swamp published by De Klerk, 1982 and Tjia et al., 1972

The Central Andes (~21°S) is a subduction-type orogeny formed in the last ~50 Ma from the subduction of the Nazca oceanic plate beneath the South American continental plate. However, the most important phases of deformation occur in the last 20 Ma. Pulses of shortening have led to the sudden growth of the by the Altiplano-Puna plateau. Previous studies have provided insights on the importance of various mechanisms on the overall shortening such as the weakening of the overriding plate from crustal eclogitization and delamination, or the importance of a relatively high friction at the subduction interface, and weak sediments in foreland. However none of them has addressed the mechanism behind these shortening pulses yet. Therefore, we built a series of high resolution 2D visco-plastic subduction models using the ASPECT geodynamic code, in which the oceanic plate is buoyancy-driven and the velocity of the continent is prescribed. We have also implemented a realistic geometry for the south American plate at ~30 Ma. We propose a new plausible mechanism (buckling and steepening of the slab) as the cause of these pulses. The buckling leads to the blockage of the trench. Consequently, the difference of velocity between the South American plate and the trench is accommodated by shortening. The data presented here includes the parameters files, for the reference model (S1) and the following alternative simulations: models with variation of the friction at the subduction interface (S2a-c), a model without eclogitization of the lower crust (S3) and a model with higher thermal conductivity of the upper crust (S4). Additionally, this publication includes the initial composition and thermal state of the lithosphere used for the models and a Readme file that gives all the instructions to run them.

What are the effects of austerity on distributional policy? We exploit the autonomy of Italian municipalities in setting non-linear income taxes and the exogenous introduction of a fiscal rule to show that austerity increases income tax progressivity. Consistent with this evidence, we find that in a panel of countries austerity correlates with higher marginal tax rates on top- but not on average-earners. The increase in progressivity in Italy is driven by high-skilled mayors, while low-skilled mayors raise taxes uniformly. In the election after the reform, high-skill mayors have higher reelection odds than low-skill mayors, while there was no difference beforehand.

These data are supplementary material to Ziegler & Heidbach (2020) and present the results of a 3D geomechanical-numerical model of the stress state with quantified uncertainties. The average modelled stress state is provided for each of the six components of the full stress tensor. In addition, the associated standard deviation for each component is provided. The modelling approach uses a published lithological model and the used data is described in the publication Ziegler & Heidbach (2020). The reduced stress tensor is derived using the Tecplot Addon GeoStress (Stromeyer & Heidbach, 2017).The model results are provided in a comma-separated ascii file. Each line in the file represents one of the approx. 3 million finite elements that comprise the model.

The financial sector plays an important role in financing the green transformation. Various regulatory initiatives in the EU aim to improve transparency in relation to the sustainability of financial products and the sustainability of economic activities of non-financial and financial undertakings. For credit institutions, the Green Asset Ratio (GAR) has been established by the European regulatory authorities as a KPI for measuring the proportion of Taxonomy-aligned on-balance-sheet exposure in relation to the total assets. The breakdown of the total GAR by type of counterparty, environmental objective and type of asset provides in-depth information about the sustainability profile of a credit institution. This information, which has not been available to date, may also initiate discussions between management and shareholders or other stakeholders regarding the future sustainability strategy of credit institutions. This paper provides an overview of the regulatory background and the method of calculating the GAR along different dimensions. Finally, the potential benefits and limitations of the GAR are discussed.

Disagreement over the nature of religion in China - a civilization that has long confounded the vocabulary of religious and secular - is nothing new. With an imperial institution that eclipsed confessional structures, and bound Heaven and Earth in ritual cosmology, China was what John Lagerwey called a “religious state.” When native notions of religion were forced into European-derived categories, the result was either a clash of interests, particularly with Christian missionaries, or dreadful mistranslations, such as the still pervasive idea of “emperor worship.” Religion in the twentieth century was been punctuated by periods of intense persecution, but the more longstanding policy of the People’s Republic has been to allow organized religion to exist, and even thrive, albeit at the cost of being coopted or transformed into a museum piece, its teaching is reduced to moral platitudes. The ideological wave under Xi Jinping is something new. Combining nationalism, personal advancement, economic welfare, and an unprecedented level of surveillance of public and virtual spaces, this wave has made the state more ideologically pervasive than it has been in half a century. It has tamed the independent charitable organizations that grew up over the previous decade, but even this is just a symptom of the larger reorientation of ideology to public spaces to become what I call the “Chinese secular.”

The purpose of this report is to outline the basic foundations of an IPOLIS social policy module, and to suggest of number of social policy indicators that fruitfully can be added to the IPOLIS database. Two types of indicators are suggested. Based on income distributions data we propose several indicators (GINI, AROP, and poverty gap) that show the shape of the income distribution at various stages of the distributive process. Also a mesure of redistribution (i.e. reductions in the GINI and AROP) are suggested. Based on model family analysis, we propose several indicators on the size of benefits, as stipulated in legal frameworks. Attached to this report is an excel file that includes all this data for a large number of European countries and years.

The dataset contains a set of structural and non-structural attributes collected using the GFZ RRVS (Remote Rapid Visual Screening) methodology. It is composed by 604 randomly distributed buildings in the urban area of Valparaiso and Viña del Mar (Chile). The survey has been carried out between November and December 2018 using a Remote Rapid Visual Screening system developed by GFZ and employing omnidirectional images from Google StreetView (vintage: December 2018) and footprints from OpenStreetMap (OSM). The buildings were inspected by local structural engineers from the Chilean Research Centre for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (CIGIDEN) while collecting their attribute values in terms of the GEM v.2.0 taxonomy

The knowledge of the characteristics of ice is important for the construction of vessels and offshore structures, challenging ice in polar regions. In ice-structure-interactions, ice often fails under compression, but the mechanisms behind along with the properties caused by the formation process are not understood completely yet. To expand this knowledge, a number of uniaxial compression tests of three different fabrication methods of laboratory made freshwater ice have been conducted for this thesis to examine the influence of the inner structure on compressive strength values. After determining the most suitable fabrication procedure, the speed dependency of the compression strength and the failure modes of ice are analyzed and discussed by using the results of simple compression tests at different axial strain rates. For these tests, a newly installed experimental set-up in a separate cold room is used for the first time. The pressure measuring system TekScan coupled with a high-speed camera is called into action to determine the strength values and the failure modes. For the three investigated production methods significant structural and mechanical differences have been recorded. As observed in earlier research, some test series have a high degree of scattering strength values depending on the experimental speed. As a result none of the production methods shows promising results in terms of reproducibility. Nevertheless it has been possible to observe the speed dependence of the compression strength and the different failure modes based on one selected production method.