ZEW Discussion Papers

Over the last 15 years, a rapidly-expanding body of literature has developed in which it is argued that ‘social capital’ positively affects institutional performance. Engagement in social life is argued not only…

This paper presents a political-economy analysis of allowance allocation in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). A common-agency model suggests that a politicalsupport maximizing government considers the…

This paper investigates the wage convergence between East German workers and their West German counterparts after reunification. Our research is based on a comparison of three groups of workers defined as…

This paper empirically analyzes the relationship between firm-provided IT training and the firm's proportion of older workers. Using data from the ZEW ICT survey of the years 2004 and 2007, the results show that…

This paper empirically analyses whether both personal and corporate taxation have an impact on companies' capital structure decisions. We investigate the effect of the difference in taxation of debt and equity…

Almost all papers on the motivation of German firms to train apprentices take as a stylised fact that training firms have to incur net costs. This notion stems practically from one source only - a series of…

Each year over three thousand R&D projects in more than two thousand firms received public grants from the German Federal Government. However, the number of subsidized firms does not reveal, whether it is always…

The recent years have been marked by massive price movements at the energy markets. Oil prices at the international energy exchanges have been rising strongly, and record high prices for oil and gas have been…

Last year's assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reemphasized the urgency of combating global warming. As the primary causes of climate change the report highlights fossil fuel use…