ZEW Discussion Papers

There are over 180 ILO conventions in many areas of labour law, industrial relations and social security, but they are not ratified universally: for the conventions adopted between 1975 and 1995, the cumulated…

This paper analyzes the influence of the structure of collective bargaining on direct investment abroad. A wage negotiation model shows that high productive firms benefit from centralized bargaining and invest…

Mainstream economists are reluctant to integrate features of bounded rationality into their behavioural assumptions. However, particularly in the field of economic policy the scope for irrational behaviour is…

We decompose the economic implications of the Kyoto Protocol at the cross-country level, splitting the total economic impact for each region into contributions from its own emission abatement policy and those…

The theoretical discussion concerning the question whether the incumbment or the (potential) entrant invests more into R & D has attracted considerable interest. This paper reports the results of an empirical…

This paper analyses the developments in the returns to education in West Germany for the period from 1984 to 1997. Based on simple Mincer-type wage equations, we estimate a return of about 8% for men and 10% for…

Productivity growth has been slow in many continental European countries overthe last few decades, especially in comparison with the United States. It has been argued thatlack of product market competition and…

In this paper we estimate the employment effects of a reduction in weekly normal hours in West German manufacturing on the basis of an econometric models using industry panel data. We distinguish between…