http://hdl.handle.net/10900/42132 2026-10-08T11:58:56Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/184114 Belief dynamics in sport: Exploring economic and behavioral consequences of suspense, surprise, and expectation violations Richardson, Travis Sport is an entertainment product, and a central premise in sports economics holds that outcome uncertainty drives its appeal: spectators are drawn to contests whose results are in doubt. Yet despite decades of investigation, the evidence for this relationship remains strikingly inconsistent, particularly in European football. This dissertation traces part of that inconsistency to how uncertainty is measured. Conventional measures are static, capturing pre-match conditions while saying little about how spectators experience a game moment by moment, and they bundle together two distinct mechanisms of entertainment utility that respond to uncertainty in opposite ways. The dissertation instead builds on belief dynamics, the processes through which spectators form, update, and react to beliefs about a contest as it unfolds. Drawing on the framework of Ely, Frankel, and Kamenica (2015), it separates suspense, the forward-looking anticipation of an unresolved outcome, from surprise, the backward-looking jolt when events depart from expectations. It is the conflation of these two mechanisms that lies behind the inconsistent empirical record. Across three empirical studies, the dissertation examines how belief dynamics shape consumer demand and behavior at three levels: within the live event, across competitions and seasons, and beyond the stadium. The first study analyzes minute-by-minute television audience data for UEFA Champions League matches in the United Kingdom and Spain. Suspense and surprise emerge as the main drivers of real-time demand, and their relative weight varies across the two markets. The second study develops match-level suspense and surprise into diagnostic tools for competition attractiveness, deriving a benchmark through simulation and applying it to more than 25,000 matches across Europe's top five leagues. It finds no uniform decline in competitive balance, but heterogeneous trends over time often driven by a small number of dominant clubs, patterns that conventional measures overlook. The third study turns to behavior beyond sport, using fine-grained vehicle speed data around Florida stadiums. Game outcomes that violate pre-game expectations leave a measurable imprint on post-game driving, with the strongest effect following close games that end in disappointing home-team losses. Together, the three studies establish suspense, surprise, and expectation violations as empirically consequential forces, whose reach extends from a single minute of a single match, to the attractiveness of entire competitions, and into everyday behavior beyond the sporting event itself. 2026-10-07T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/183799 Zwischen Geoökonomie und technologischer Transformation : Industriepolitik der EU für die Elektromobilität und die Rolle der deutschen Automobilhersteller Katz, Stefan Die zunehmende Geoökonomisierung der internationalen Wirtschaftsbeziehungen zählt zu den prägendsten Veränderungen des frühen 21. Jahrhunderts und zu den größten Herausforderungen für das exportorientierte deutsche Wirtschaftsmodell. Vor dem Hintergrund verschärfter systemischer Rivalitäten, wachsender Technologiekonkurrenz und strategischer Abhängigkeiten gewinnt die Frage an Bedeutung, wie die EU und ihre Mitgliedstaaten zentrale Schlüsselindustrien industriepolitisch flankieren und eigene Sicherheitsinteressen wahren können. Die Arbeit untersucht, wie geoökonomische Industriepolitik in der Europäischen Union entsteht, welche Faktoren ihre Ausgestaltung prägen und welche Rolle Unternehmen in diesen Aushandlungsprozessen spielen. Zu diesem Zweck werden mit dem Aufbau der europäischen Batteriezellindustrie sowie der EU-Antisubventionsuntersuchung gegen chinesische Elektrofahrzeuge zwei zentrale Fallstudien im Bereich der europäischen Automobilindustrie analysiert. Die Untersuchung zeigt, dass geoökonomische Industriepolitik durch einen komplexen Aushandlungsprozess zwischen EU-Institutionen, Mitgliedstaaten, Unternehmen und externen Akteuren erklärt werden kann. Dabei wirken internationale Machtverschiebungen, technologische Transformationen, nationale Interessenlagen sowie unternehmerische Strategien gleichzeitig auf politische Entscheidungen ein. 2026-09-25T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/182958 No Exit from Exit: The Party Politics of Emigration in the European Union Reiß, Lea Giulia In the last two decades, amid EU enlargement and the Eurozone crisis, many European coun-tries have experienced large-scale population loss through intra-EU mobility, fueling skill and labour shortages, population ageing and democratic backsliding. Yet emigration has attracted far less scholarly attention than immigration, and its specific political consequences for govern-ing parties in origin states remain poorly understood. This dissertation addresses that gap by asking: how do governing parties in EU origin states navigate a problem they cannot solve? The dissertation argues that emigration constitutes a structurally blame-laden issue: it is highly visible, readily attributed to domestic political and economic conditions, and nearly impossible to address through available policy instruments. Two constraints are central. Legally, EU free movement law makes it impossible for national governments to restrict exit or force emigrants to return. Structurally, the main drivers of emigration – e.g., persistent wage gaps, labour market dysfunction, and migration networks – cannot be reversed within a single legislative term. Three empirical articles examine governing parties’ responses to emigration at successive lev-els. The first (“Emigration – Who Cares?”), drawing on 938 party manifestos across all 27 EU member states (2004–2023), maps how, and under what conditions and by whom emigration is politicised. The second (“Please come back!”) analyses an original dataset of 81 national-level emigrant return policies across 17 member states (2004–2023) and gives insights into why gov-ernments adopt such programmes despite their limited effectiveness. The third (“Who Gets to Return?”) uses the same dataset alongside case studies of Ireland and Portugal to show how the universalist rhetoric of return policies masks systematic, party-family-specific selectivity in who actually receives meaningful return incentives. Taken together, the three articles point to a dual political logic of blame avoidance and distributive politics: blame avoidance explains the framing of emigration and the need for visible action, while distributive politics explains why that action takes partisan and selective forms.; Die Dissertation ist gesperrt bis zum 02. August 2028 ! 2028-08-02T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10900/182912 Essays on Sustainable Finance Sandbaek, Benedikte This dissertation examines sustainable finance along a continuum from regulatory implementa-tion to measurable climate impact. As the European Union's regulatory architecture for sustain-able finance continues to evolve, fundamental questions about how disclosure frameworks op-erate in practice and whether they deliver meaningful environmental outcomes remain insuffi-ciently addressed. The first part comprises studies examining the regulatory requirements and practical challenges of EU Taxonomy disclosure in banks. Drawing on data from German banks across different business models and portfolio structures, the studies document how data limitations, regulatory ambiguity, strategic incentives, and structural constraints lead to divergent interpretive decisions that substantially limit the comparability and management relevance of disclosed metrics. Re-cent regulatory developments under the Omnibus simplification package are further shown to address some but not all of the structural limitations identified. The second part provides empirical evidence on the Green Asset Ratio as the central sustaina-bility indicator for banks, examining a heterogeneous sample covering both large universal banks and small regional savings and cooperative banks. The findings reveal that reported val-ues are generally very low and that disclosed metrics do not systematically reflect stakeholder information needs, raising important questions about the effectiveness of the current framework as a disclosure-based steering mechanism. The third part introduces the Abatement Impact Factor, a metric that quantifies lifecycle green-house gas abatement per euro invested in residential building renovations. Applied to a simulat-ed sample of multi-residential buildings within the German housing stock, the analysis reveals pronounced heterogeneity in abatement efficiency across technologies and building characteris-tics, highlighting the importance of cost-efficient prioritisation in renovation investment decisions. Taken together, the three parts offer grounded analytical and empirical insights that connect regulatory intent with real-world climate impact, contributing to both academic inquiry and evi-dence-based policy design. 2026-09-02T00:00:00Z