ZEW Discussion Papers

Overview

Researchers at the ZEW participate in scientific debates by publishing their papers. The papers are predominantly in English (marked). For the German papers an English abstract is available. The contributions are intended for a final publication in special interest titles. The discussion papers can be downloaded as PDF or PostScript files starting from 1.1.1998. They aimed at national and international target groups.

  1. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-015 // 2025

    Competition Among Digital Services: Evidence From the 2021 Meta Outage

    On October 4, 2021, all services provided by Meta Platforms, Inc. (then Facebook, Inc.) became unavailable unexpectedly for all its worldwide users for a period of about six hours. We use detailed high‐frequency…

  2. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-014 // 2025

    Founder Personality and Scaling Decisions in Entrepreneurial Firms

    Personality drives human decision-making. Research on corporate research and development(R&D), however, typically considers strategic decision-making to be independent of the decisionmaker’s personality traits.…

  3. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-016 // 2025

    Skills, Job Application Strategies, and the Gender Wage Gap: Evidence From Online Freelancing

    This paper examines how worker skills and job application behavior contribute to the gender wage gap on a major online freelancing platform. We observe significant occupational sorting by gender, with women…

  4. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-009 // 2025

    Bidding for Subsidies With One’s Patience

    We study the problem of distributing subsidies in a market that includes both marginal individuals in need of assistance and infra-marginal individuals who would purchase the subsidized product without…

  5. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-013 // 2025

    The Effect of Taxes on CEO Performance

    In this paper, we investigate the effect of higher personal income taxes on CEO and firm performance in publicly traded US firms. In response to higher taxes on compensation, CEOs are less likely to reach…

  6. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-012 // 2025

    Narratives About Fiscal Policy: Are Firm Decision-Makers’ Tax Preferences Driven by Redistribution or Fiscal Consolidation Motives?

    Motivated by the increasing frequency with which business leaders publicly express their views on policy issues and by recent findings on the role of narratives in shaping preferences and behaviors, we…

  7. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-011 // 2025

    Taxes and Pay Without Performance: Evidence From Executives

    This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on the taxation of top-income earners by empirically investigating the impact of tax policy changes on pay without performance. Using data on executive…

  8. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-010 // 2025

    Reverse Engineering and Innovation: Empirical Evidence From a High-Tech Economy

    Reverse engineering allows firms to learn about critical components and design features of competitors' technologies. Historically, reverse engineering has often been used to help technological laggards to…

  9. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 25-008 // 2025

    Labor Market Integration of Asylum Seekers in Europe: Recent Trends and Barriers

    The labor market integration of asylum seekers remains a contested issue. Using the EU-Labor-Force-Survey, we characterize the state of asylum seekers’ labor market integration in Europe, and provide…

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Kerstin Heres

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