Using data for West Germany from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyse the impact of transitions from unemployment to full-time employment on life satisfaction, with special focus on the influence of job quality. We apply various indicators of job quality (self-reported job satisfaction, wages, type of contract, and indicators of the fit between the worker and job requirements). We control for the influence of income changes and other factors affecting life satisfaction, using a conditional logit estimator. Results suggest that job quality only matters to some extent, and often people in bad jobs are still better off than those who remain unemployed. This effect is statistically significant for most indicators of job quality, except for workers with low job satisfaction and for those whose new job is much worse than their pre-unemployment job.We would like to thank Gesine Stephan, conference participants at the ISQOLS conference 2007 in San Diego, USA and the 2008 meeting of the IARIW in Portoroz, Slovenia, as well as seminar participants in Nuremberg, Göttingen and Vienna and three anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions on earlier versions. All remaining errors are ours.

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a b s t r a c tModel-based energy scenarios are a widely used tool for supporting economic and political decision makers. The results of energy modeling and the conclusions deduced therefrom, however, depend on the model input data derived from framework assumptions about future developments in the embedding society, which are deeply uncertain in the long term. The challenge to deal with this 'context uncertainty' in a systematic and comprehensive manner has only recently started to attract intensified attention in energy research; the search for appropriate methods is ongoing. This paper proposes a new concept for the construction of socio-technical energy scenarios, which combines familiar environmental modeling approaches with new developments in qualitative scenario methodology, and demonstrates the possible application of the concept in model-based energy scenario construction.

Energy conversion is a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and energy transition scenarios are a key tool for gaining a greater understanding of the possible pathways toward climate protection. There is consensus in energy research that political and societal framework conditions will play a pivotal role in shaping energy transitions. In energy scenario construction, this perspective is increasingly acknowledged through the approach of informing model-based energy analysis with storylines about societal futures, an exercise we call "socio-technical energy scenario construction" in this article. However, there is a dispute about how to construct the storylines in a traceable, consistent, comprehensive, and reproducible way. This study aims to support energy researchers considering the use of the concept of socio-technical scenarios in two ways: first, we provide a state-of-the-art analysis of socio-technical energy scenario construction by comparing 16 studies with respect to five categories. Second, we address the dispute regarding storyline construction in energy research and examine 13 reports using the Cross-Impact Balances method. We collated researcher statements on the strengths and challenges of this method and identified seven categories of promises and challenges each.

Sustainable development embraces a broad spectrum of social, economic and ecological aspects. Thus, a sustainable transformation process of energy systems is inevitably multidimensional and needs to go beyond climate impact and cost considerations. An approach for an integrated and interdisciplinary sustainability assessment of energy system transformation pathways is presented here. It first integrates energy system modeling with a multidimensional impact assessment that focuses on life cycle-based environmental and macroeconomic impacts. Then, stakeholders’ preferences with respect to defined sustainability indicators are inquired, which are finally integrated into a comparative scenario evaluation through a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), all in one consistent assessment framework. As an illustrative example, this holistic approach is applied to the sustainability assessment of ten different transformation strategies for Germany. Applying multi-criteria decision analysis reveals that both ambitious (80%) and highly ambitious (95%) carbon reduction scenarios can achieve top sustainability ranks, depending on the underlying energy transformation pathways and respective scores in other sustainability dimensions. Furthermore, this research highlights an increasingly dominant contribution of energy systems’ upstream chains on total environmental impacts, reveals rather small differences in macroeconomic effects between different scenarios and identifies the transition among societal segments and climate impact minimization as the most important stakeholder preferences.

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Electricity generation from renewables in Germany has now reached an energy economically relevant magnitude. The further increase of electricity from renewable energy sources is driven by the Energy Concept enacted by the Federal Government in 2010 with the goal of transforming the energy system into a renewable based one by 2050 [1]. In order to achieve the political targets reorganization in terms of technical, organizational and financial aspects is needed. The transition and structural adjustments are characterized by a huge variety of actors, who are connected through complex interactions with one another and who react very differently to changes in the energy economic environment. We will present the agent-based simulation model AMIRIS (Agent-based Model for the Integration of Renewables Into the Power System), which can be used as policy design tool to foster the integration of renewable energy sources into the electricity market 1 .