ZEW Discussion Papers

Firms in developed countries face increasing shortages of young workers. This paper studies the importance of young workers, particularly vocational trainees, for firm technology investments. Leveraging…

Investments in energy technologies are substantially governed by climate policy. We demonstrate analytically that price-based instruments, such as carbon-taxes, and quantity-based regulations, like emission…

Firm-level Climate Action Response Plans (CARPs) are strategic plans comprising firms’ climate change mitigation and adaptation commitments. Given the importance of CARPs for meeting climate change targets,…

Companies in various industries are under growing pressure to assess the costs of decarbonizing their operations. This paper develops a generic abatement cost concept to identify the cost-efficient combination…

The Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) of 1968 was focused on highlighting, and ultimately reducing, poverty in the United States. As part of the campaign, protestors from across the country were transported to…

Smoking bans have been widely implemented, despite mixed evidence on their effectiveness in reducing firsthand smoking. This paper provides novel insights into the dynamic impacts of smoking bans in the context…

This study investigates how crises affect firms’ adoption of frontier technologies using the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study. The analysis tracks the nature, timing, and pandemic-related motivations of…

This paper investigates the impact of Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) and Research and Development (R&D) grants on firms' R&D investment using data from Belgian R&D-active firms over the past decade. Our…

We study the implications of services trade for firm innovation. Using a quasi-experimental shift-share design, we find that access to foreign knowledge-related services improves the innovativeness of domestic…