ZEW Discussion Papers

I consider a seller selling a good to bidders with two-dimensional private information: their valuation for a good and their characteristic. While valuations are non-verifiable, characteristics are partially…

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities…

The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to offer cost sharing reductions (CSRs) to low-income consumers on the Marketplaces. We link 2013-2015 All-Payer Claims Data to 2004-2013 administrative hospital…

This paper studies the long-term consequences on firms and workers of the credit crunch triggered by the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Relying on a unique matched bank-employer-employee administrative…

Does large-scale refugee immigration affect crime rates in receiving countries? We address this question based on the large and unexpected refugee inflow to Germany that peaked in 2015–2016. Arriving refugees…

Increases in youth vaping rates and concerns of a new generation of nicotine addicts recently prompted an increase in the federal minimum legal purchase age (MLPA) for tobacco products, including e-cigarettes,…

Health expenditure data almost always include extreme values, implying that the underlying distribution has heavy tails. This may result in infinite variances as well as higher-order moments and bias the…

This paper shows that the American Inventor’s Protection Act, which introduced the disclosure of patent applications after 18 months, i.e. before a grant decision is taken and, hence, before it is known whether…

In markets where sellers’ marginal costs of production have a common component, they have informational advantage over buyers regarding those costs. This information asymmetry between sellers and buyers is…