ZEW Discussion Papers

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…

This paper investigates whether the impact of trade shocks on employment and wages persists across generations. Using survey data with retrospective information on parental employment, we study the causal effect…

The availability of social media data is growing and represents a new data source for economic research. This paper presents a detailed study on the use of data from a career-oriented social networking platform…

Policymakers regularly rely on public financial institutions and government offices to provide loans to clean energy projects. However, the market failures that public loan provision addresses and the role it…

This paper investigates a unique policy designed to maintain employment during the privatization of East German firms after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The policy required new owners of the firms to commit to…

We study the economic consequences of anti-loss trafficking rules, which disallow the use of loss carry-forwards as tax shield after a substantial ownership change. We use staggered changes to anti-loss…