ZEW Discussion Papers

In Germany, the medium-term financial planning (“Mifrifi”) was introduced at the end of the sixties. This study scrutinizes the experience of the German Bund with more than thirty years of financial planning. …

A simple model of yardstick competition between jurisdictions is presented. Governments of jurisdictions face the alternative to choose between an old and a new policy with stochastic payoffs. The new policy…

The education variable in the IAB employment subsample has two shortcomings: missing values and inconsistencies with the reporting rule. We propose several deductive imputation procedures to improve the…

Before making di±cult decisions, individuals tend to collect information on decision makers in reference groups. With respect to policy innovations in a decentralized public sector, this may give rise to…

From 1 January 2005 onwards the European Union has launched the first largescale international carbon emissions trading program. As the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS) covers only part of domestic carbon…

We compare information on the length of unemployment spells contained in the IAB employment subsample (IABS) and in the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Due to the lack of information on registered…

It is commonplace in the debate on Germany’s labor market problems to argue that high unemployment and low wage dispersion are related. This paper analyses the relationship between unemployment and residual…

Between 1991 and 1997 West Germany spent on average about 3.6 bn Euro per year on public sector sponsored training programmes for the unemployed. We base our empirical analysis on a new administrative data base…

Financial markets in Europe become more and more integrated. The persisting fragmentation of financial supervision, however, constitutes a lasting obstacle to integration. The aim of this paper is to assess…