ZEW Discussion Papers

Changes to the degree of a tax system’s progressiveness are a key element of many introduced or considered tax reforms. Especially, flat tax reforms have received increasing attention resulting from their…

The coalition agreement of the new German government includes the plan to introduce tax incentives for research and development. Several different types of tax incentives are currently under discussion,…

The Bologna Process was introduced in the member states of the European Union in 1999 with the aim of creating a European Higher Education Area. The main component of the reform was the replacement of the…

Highly progressive tax systems entail disincentives for private economic activity and, thus, may hamper potential growth. Nevertheless, attempts to introduce alternative tax schedules regularly encounter…

The tragedy of little Madeleine in 2007 did not only catch the headlines of the public media but was also followed with interest by researchers after the remarkably successful donation acquisition of the…

Since the late 1970s and continuing through the mid-2000s, overall wage inequality has been increasing in the U.S., Germany, and the UK as well as in other countries. As possible explanations of these trends,…

Wage inequality has been increasing in many industrialized countries over the past decades. Parallel to this trend, coverage by collective wage bargaining has declined strongly in many economies (OECD, 2004).…

We examine in this paper whether owner controlled banks or manager controlled banks suffered larger losses during the financial crisis. We show that banks operating in countries with better shareholder rights…

This paper gives an overview of the German Social Long-term Care Insurance (Soziale Pflegeversicherung, SLTCI). In the current state, Germany provides a universal, non meanstested contribution-financed social…