ZEW Discussion Papers

In recent years, the view on patents as an instrument for firms to appropriate the returns from inventive activities has shifted towards a more explicit consideration of a patent's strategic importance. In fact,…

It is a well-known fact that the level of parents' education is strongly correlated with the educational achievement of their children. This effect is more robust than that of any school or institutional…

In this paper I test the prediction that the reference standard for income comparisons increases in a person's productive ability, which is proxied for by education. The prediction is derived from a model by…

There is a large literature on the costs and benefits of immigration within a given system of social security. More recently, economists have begun to address a related question: does immigration and, more…

Germany still has a generous pay-as-you-go public pension insurance with high effective replacement rates and low effective retirement ages. Nevertheless, through a long reform process that began in 1992, the…

The harmonisation of company taxation within the European Union is on the European Commission's agenda since a long time. An equal company tax burden across all EU member states would guarantee efficiency in…

Knowledge produced in the public sector has frequently been shown to be an important ingredient of economic growth and technological change. Most of the existing research puts emphasis on formal university…

In many situations, applicants compete for a limited number of positions, and selection is based on perceived skill or talent, for example in hiring and promotion procedures or in nominations of election…

Governments employ different instruments to support private R&D activities in order to increase firms’ R&D efforts and innovative performance. The most important measure used by the German Federal Government to…