ZEW Discussion Papers

Voters dealing with jurisdictional merger decisions face a trade-off between economies of scale and preference costs. Larger jurisdictions may offer cost advantages, yet the downside is that policies in larger…

I study a case of market sharing agreements to provide evidence of coordination between colluding firms on the degree to which they compete against each other (henceforth referred to as head-to-head competition)…

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold…

In this paper we investigate behavioral constraints to savings among smallholder farmers in rural Ethiopia. Increasing savings by overcoming such behavioral constraints has been documented to have positive…

We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on civic capital and economic performance, studying the case of the Stasi in East Germany. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and…

In this paper we analyze the effects of a German job creation scheme (JCS) on the social integration and well-being of long-term unemployed individuals. Using linked survey and administrative data for…

We analyze a large merger in the Dutch banking market during the financial crisis using disaggregated data. Based on a merger simulation model, we evaluate merger-induced changes in the interest rates for…

We study the political economy of allocation decisions within a major state investment bank. Our focus is the European Investment Bank (EIB) – “The Bank of the EU” – which is the largest multilateral lending…

The development of Robo Advice offers bank-independent FinTechs the opportunity to capture shares of the market for investment advice, brokerage and the management of financial instruments. In the long run,…