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8th World Conference on Photovoltaic Energy Conversion; 930-934, With the large amount of photovoltaic (PV) modules required for a more renewable energy sector, strategies to avoid the toxic material lead, which is still present in most conventional modules today, becomes more and more relevant. This work presents the result of the government-funded research project “BermUDa”, in which the industrial realization and environmental impact of lead-free modules was investigated. The herein chosen approach was to directly replace lead-containing module materials (namely metallization paste and solder cell connectors) with lead-free alternatives, while leaving the industrial production process as unchanged as possible. For this, a large number of preprocessed silicon wafers underwent cell (PERC) and module production, where the processability was tested and compared with conventional lead-containing materials. Subsequently, the performance of the products (cells and PV modules) was tested and compared in terms of electrical performance and reliability in power measurements and accelerated aging tests, respectively. The project thereby demonstrated the feasibility to work with lead-free technologies and adapt currently established industrial processes to produce completely lead-free PV modules that can compete with their lead-containing counterparts in terms of sustainability and costs (LCOE). The work also suggests focus on cell metallization pastes, driven by future market demand, to develop lead-free pastes that can achieve better fine line printing capabilities to allow greater flexibility when converting an existing production line to produce lead-free PV modules.

Investors pay a substantial premium to hedge against fluctuations in volatility—the variance risk premium (VRP). The asset-pricing literature has presented numerous models with jumps in economic fundamentals to reproduce the properties and the time variation of the VRP. This paper shows that these quantitative results are almost exclusively driven by an inaccurate measure of conditional volatility. Solved accurately, conditional volatility exhibits—counterfactually—a strong procyclical pattern and the models do not deliver a sizeable VRP in response to jumps in state variables. The notion that the VRP is purely a compensation for fluctuations in macroeconomic uncertainty does not hold.

We introduce an option-implied proxy for the health of financial intermediaries—the Leverage Bearing Capacity (LBC). LBC is the leverage of a fictitious intermediary that targets a fixed level of risk and rebalances its capital structure on an ongoing basis. Our measure is based on market values, available at any frequency, and naturally incorporates higher moments. We analyze the dynamics of LBC within simulation and event studies and demonstrate that LBC is tightly linked to financial sector uncertainty. Building on an intermediary asset pricing model, we validate that LBC proxies the marginal wealth of intermediaries. Empirically, LBC explains the expected returns across several asset classes and subsumes the explanatory power of existing measures of intermediaries’ health, financial uncertainty, and common risk factors.

This paper studies the role of generalized disappointment aversion (GDA) in reconciling several asset-pricing puzzles in models of long-run risks. To fully capture the nonlinearities introduced by these preferences, we solve the model globally with projection. This allows us to scrutinize the channels through which GDA unfolds. A key feature of our calibrated model is the significant wedge GDA drives between the physical and the risk-neutral measure. The model captures not only the size of the variance risk premium (VRP), but also the hump-shaped predictability pattern and the prominent role of downside risks for the VRP and its predictive power.

dargest. von Friedrich Lorenz Hoffmann