ZEW Discussion Papers

The creation of spinoff companies is often promoted as a desirable mechanism for transferring knowledge and technologies from research organizations to the private sector for commercialization. However, when…

Studying wage dynamics has been a key element of labor economics for a long time. One major finding is the widening of the wage distribution in most developed countries that started in the 1970s in several…

Time preferences play an important role in economics. Among others, time preferences are responsible for the decision on how much people invest in human capital and schooling. For instance stronger preferences…

Since the introduction of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) in 2005, a new area of research has developed within the field of applied econometrics: Carbon Finance. Carbon Finance focuses on the analysis…

According to the Schumpeterian view, intellectual property (IP) protection policy and antitrust policy might affect firms' incentives to innovate in opposite directions. The former policy gives monopoly rights…

In 2006, on average 43% of the firms in the EU-15 practiced IT outsourcing (ITO). The determinants of ITO as well as firms' incentives to source out non-core activities have been examined extensively. As…

Final goods and some services are nowadays often not only produced at one location but their value creation is organised within global value chains: Many firms source inputs, either intermediate goods or…

It is today widely acknowledged that innovation constitutes one of the most important drivers of economic growth and competitiveness (see e.g. Solow, 1957; Griliches, 1979, 1992; Hall, 1996). Private sector…

This article discusses the relation between different concepts of investment in firms. In addition to the traditional notion of investment which focuses on investment in fixed assets, the concepts of…