ZEW Discussion Papers

Energy efficiency improvements, i.e. a more prudent use of scarce and polluting resources while simultaneously maintaining a certain level of output, are considered one of the most promising measures to meet…

Informational asymmetries abound in anonymous markets, such as those opening in the internet almost every day. In particular, before trading takes place, the typical buyer does not know whether her anonymous…

We investigate the opposing impacts of two basic effects underlying the decision to patent: the protective and the disclosure effect. On the one hand, patents grant a temporary monopoly to an inventor, and thus,…

While there is no doubt that tax evasion is widespread in developing countries, exact measures of its extent are difficult to obtain because, by definition, tax evasion is hidden. However, such estimates are…

Fuel poverty may become an increasingly severe problem in developed countries in cases when real prices for fossil fuels increase at high rates or when real energy prices increase due to policies for greenhouse…

The public debate on tax base erosion by multinational enterprises (MNEs) has been stirred up by strikingly low effective tax rates (ETRs) of some very prominent US-American information technology companies.…

Google, Apple and other highly profitable multinationals are able to drastically reduce their tax burden on worldwide income by shifting profits from high- to low-tax countries. Reports on these tax avoidance…

For providing protection for intellectual property, patent law requires the comprehensive description of the invention, its making and using. The goal of this disclosure requirement is to provide newly generated…