ZEW Discussion Papers

This paper analyzes whether Taylor-type policy rules can be used to describe the behavior of the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank from the beginning of 1999 until mid 2002. Since there was no common…

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession…

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable…

This paper investigates the effects of the EU Environmental Management and Auditing Scheme (EMAS) on environmental innovations and competitiveness in German facilities. It comprises twelve in-depth case studies…

The paper revisits the local determinants of crime using a spatial model distinguishing between resident and non-resident offenders. Employing data for German municipalities, the model is estimated by means of a…

We analyze the venture capitalist's decision on the timing of the IPO, the offer price and the fraction of shares he sells in the course of the IPO. A venture capitalist may decide to take a company public or to…

The aim of this study is the analysis of so called socially responsible investments (SRI). First, the performance of SRI equity investment funds and equity indices is investigated using Jensen´s alpha as…

Despite of the apparent failure of the Kyoto Protocol with respect to environmental effectiveness, it has established a broad international mechanism that might be able to provide a global reduction of…

This paper attempts to assess the Europe-wide systemic risk in banking. We employ a bivariate GARCH model to estimate conditional correlations between European bank stock indices. These correlations are used as…