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Die Bilanzierung von Umweltwirkungen spielt eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Entwicklung nachhaltiger und umweltfreundlicher Technologien und Konzepte. Dies gilt auch in der Entwicklung von Gebäuden mit adaptiven Hüllen und Strukturen und stellt darüber hinaus weitreichende Anforderungen an alle beteiligten Disziplinen. Die vollständige Integration der Ökobilanzierung in den Planungs- und Auslegungsprozess ermöglicht, Umweltwirkungen als Optimierungsgrößen in den komplexen, dynamischen Berechnungswerkzeugen einzusetzen. Die bisherigen Ergebnisse des SFB 1244 bescheinigen adaptiven Tragwerken und Fassaden großes Potenzial zur Einsparung von Ressourcen und Umweltwirkungen. Die ganzheitliche Betrachtungsweise, sowohl in Bezug auf den Lebenszyklus als auch auf die interdisziplinären Wechselwirkungen, stellt sicher, dass die relevanten Effekte und Einflüsse in der Bilanzierung berücksichtigt werden. Das stellt die Methode der Ökobilanzierung selbst jedoch vor neue Herausforderungen im Umgang mit einer Vielzahl an Varianten und den umfangreichen Wechselwirkungen zwischen Auslegung und Einflüssen auf Parameter in der Nutzungsphase, wie z. B. den Energieverbrauch oder die Lebensdauer.

It has been suggested that visual images are memorized across brief periods of time by vividly imagining them as if they still were there. Such visual imagery has been proposed as a key mechanism underlying working memory. However, the ability to evoke visual imagery varies substantially across individuals, raising the question whether people with weak or even absent visual imagery might use other, non-visual strategies for memorization. Here, we systematically investigated this question in two groups of participants, very strong and very weak imagers, that were asked to remember images across brief delay periods. We were able to reliably reconstruct the memorized stimuli from early visual cortex during the delay period. Importantly, the quality of reconstruction was equally accurate for both strong and weak imagers. The decodable information also closely reflected behavioral precision in both groups, suggesting it could potentially contribute to behavioral performance, even in the extreme case of completely aphantasic individuals. Our data thus suggest that strong and weak imagers do not differ in how early visual areas encode memory-related information and that this information might even be equally used in both groups.

Inhibiting ongoing responses when environmental demands change is a critical component of human motor control. Experimentally, the stop signal task (SST) represents the gold standard response inhibition paradigm. However, an emerging body of evidence suggests that the SST conflates two dissociable sources of inhibition, namely an involuntarily pause associated with attentional capture and the (subsequent) voluntary cancellation of action. The extent to which these processes also occur in other response tasks is unknown.24 younger (20-35 years) and 23 older (60-85 years) adults completed a series of tasks involving rapid unimanual or bimanual responses to a visual stimulus. A subset of trials required cancellation of one component of an initial bimanual response (i.e., selective stop task; stop left response, continue with right response) or enacting an additional response (e.g., press left button as well as right button). Critically, both tasks involved some infrequent stimuli which bore no behavioural imperative (i.e., they had to be ignored).EMG recordings of voluntary responses during the stopping tasks revealed bimanual covert responses (i.e., muscle activation which was suppressed before a button press ensued), consistent with a pause process, following both stopandignore stimuli, before the required response was subsequently enacted. Critically, we also observed the behavioural consequences of a similar involuntary pause in trials where action cancellation was not part of the response set (i.e., when the additional stimulus required additional action or ignoring, but not inhibition). The findings shed new light on the mechanisms of inhibition and their generalisability to other task contexts.

In this paper, I develop an integrated approach to collective models and matching models of the marriage market. In the collective framework, both household formation and the intra-household allocation of bargaining power are taken as given. This is no longer the case in the present contribution, where both are endogenous to the determination of equilibrium on the marriage market. I characterize a class of "proper'' collective models which can be embedded into a general matching framework with imperfectly transferable utility. In such models, the bargaining sets are parametrized by an analytical device called distance function, which plays a key role both for writing down the usual stability conditions and for estimation. In general, however, distance functions are not known in closed-form. I provide an efficient method for computing distance functions, that works even with the most complex collective models. Finally, I illustrate my results with a proof-of-concept application that uses PSID data. I identify the sharing rule and its distribution and consider two counterfactual experiments of women empowerment, both of which are shown to affect the sharing rule and the investment of couples in public goods.

The Moroccan Model Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) (2019) adds to a growing body of ‘new-generation’ model BITs that have fuelled the conversation on reforming the investment arbitration system. Broadly speaking, such agreements have attempted to rethink means of dispute resolution and traditional investment protection standards while adding detailed investor obligations and standards of conduct. In that context, this article discusses the provisions of the Moroccan Model BIT (2019), highlighting not only progressive developments but also areas of concern. Upon comparing the provisions of the BIT with those of other ‘new-generation’ investment agreements, as well as existing treaty practice, the authors offer the following findings.

We use a simple structural matching model with unobserved heterogeneity to produce counterfactual marriage patterns of two kinds: counterfactuals that hold the match surplus constant across markets and counterfactuals that hold the joint utility constant. These counterfactuals allow us to decompose matching patterns into an intensive margin (who marries whom) and an extensive margin (how many and who remain single). We apply this approach to US data from 1962 to 2017 and show that marital patterns can explain about 1/3 of the rise in income inequality, the intensive margin contributing for 5%, the extensive margin for the remaining 95%. The extensive margin is itself driven for 2/3 by a change in the total number of singles and 1/3 by a change in the distribution of types among singles.