ZEW Discussion Papers

While a widespread consensus exists among macroeconomists that the German labour market reforms in 2003-2005 have successfully contributed to the decline of the unemployment rate, critics claim that the reforms…

The effectiveness of patents to stimulate R&D is often limited. If innovation is sequential and complementary, patent protection may even stifle technical advance (Bessen and Maskin, 2006). The surge of…

For innovative start-ups, an effective patent system is a crucial factor for success and survival. The importance of patents for start-ups is based on two features. First, patents grant temporary monopoly rights…

Private equity (PE) firms have long time emphasized their role as investors who create value in their portfolio companies. In this paper we analyze a key strategy of PE investors, the so-called buy-and-build…

Start-ups are a vehicle to transfer knowledge and technology within an economy. The way in which this occurs is that founders of start-ups pick up ideas that otherwise would have been neglected and bring them to…

Sectoral heterogeneity is crucial to address several economic questions. This pap er provides a detailed mapping of sectoral pro duction p ossibility frontiers, using different nesting structures and levels of…

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges in current environmental policy. Appropriate policies intended to stimulate efficient adaptation and mitigation should not exclusively rely on the assumption…

Fiscal federalism in Germany is characterized by lacking sub-national tax autonomy and intensive fiscal equalization. Due to a sunset clause, the current equalization syst em has to be renegotiated by the year…

Estimating the private return to R&D investment has been a major goal for decades and most of the empirical literature has been built around the knowledge production function. In this framework, investment in…