ZEW Discussion Papers

The EU's revenue system is still typical for an organisation based on international cooperation and stands in contrast to the Union's far advanced legislative and political role. This contrast feeds the debate…

European climate policy is on its way to implement the policy instruments required to achieve the ambitious abatement goals announced earlier in 2007, which are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent…

For many central banks, overnight money markets are the key channel through which monetary policy is executed. Overnight rates, such as the US federal funds rate, are the operational targets of monetary policy…

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…