ZEW Discussion Papers

To insure policyholders against contemporaneous health expenditure shocks and future reclassification risk, long-term health insurance constitutes an alternative to community-rated short-term contracts with an…

Public spending (i.e., “G”) enables governments to fulfill their fiscal policies. This paper takes a micro perspective and quantifies the impact of procurement spending — a specific component of G — on firm…

We analyze competition on nonlinear prices in homogeneous goods markets with consumer search. In equilibrium firms offer two-part tariffs consisting of a linear price and lump-sum fee. The equilibrium production…

Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their “friends”…

In markets with search frictions, consumers can acquire information about goods either through costly search or from friends via word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. How do sellers’ market power react to a very…

In many markets buyers are poorly informed about which firms sell the product (product availability) and prices, and therefore have to spend time to obtain this information. In contrast, sellers typically have a…

Comprehensive mitigation efforts (including all emission sources and sinks, all GHGs, and all economic sectors) are becoming ever-more important. While established methods of direct emissions avoidance must…

We explore the role of social mobility as a driver of economic development. First, we map the geography of intergenerational mobility of education for 52 Latin American regions, as well as its evolution over…

We develop a portfolio balance model to analyze the impact of euro area quantitative easing (QE) on asset yields. Our model features two countries each populated by two agents representing their respective…