ZEW Discussion Papers

The recent years have been marked by massive price movements in resource markets. Particularly record high prices for oil have been reached. Although until late 2008, oil prices have decreased from nearly 150 to…

Richard Florida’s thought-provoking concept of the Creative Class can be seen a fruitful contribution for our understanding of regional economic development because it stresses the importance of professional…

Using information on almost 12.000 firms this article examines the impact of innovation on employment growth in innovating small and medium enterprises. In contrast to existing studies, which typically use the…

Firms are affected by the product demand. This leads to employment adjustments. On the internal labour market there exist two prominent possibilities, changes of working hours, especially overtime, and…

Even though wage inequality in West Germany started to rise at the top of the wage distribution in the 1980s, this rise was delayed for about ten years at the bottom. Our paper investigates the changes in the…

Economists think that unemployment is an important cause for crime. From the theoretical point of view, this belief seems to be reasonable, since, according to the standard economic theory of crime by Nobel…

In recent decades, German industry-level bargaining has often been blamed for the deterioration of firms’ competitiveness, as centrally negotiated wages are perceived to be particularly harmful to those firms…

The role of information and communication technologies (ICT) as a driving force for productivity and competitiveness is in the meanwhile well recognized. A look at the country level, however, reveals that the…