ZEW Discussion Papers

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these…

In this paper, we investigate both short- and long-term impacts of financial stimuli on public goods provision when contributions are tied to individual harm-related behavior. We conduct a large-scaled field…

We manipulate workers’ perceived meaning of a job in a field experiment. Half of the workers are informed that their job is important, the other half are told that their job is of no relevance. Results show that…

We study the effects of a field experiment designed to motivate employee ideas, at a large technology company. Employees were encouraged to submit ideas on process and product improvements via an online system.…

This paper examines how university research alliances and other cooperative links with universities contribute to startup employment growth. We argue that “scientific absorptive capacity” at the startup is…

A recent theoretical model by Epstein and Schneider (2008) predicts that a firm’s assets will be undervalued by the market if the information surrounding these assets is ambiguous. The model further predicts…

The specification of parameters is a crucial task in the development of economic models. The objective of this paper is to improve the standard parameter specification of computable general equilibrium (CGE)…

Building on real options literature, this study shows that the use of a staged approach for the management of innovation projects affects the innovation output of firms differently depending on firm…

Employment tax credit programs have been repeatedly used during economic crises, although their usefulness is empirically contestable. The objective of this paper is to quantify the tax effects of employment tax…