ZEW Discussion Papers

We explore the role of social capital in the spread of the recent Covid-19 pan­demic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Swe­den, Switzerland and the UK. We exploit…

We extend the canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk to shock distributions with left-skewness and excess kurtosis, to which we refer as higher-order risk. We estimate our extended income…

Organisation capital is a key intangible asset, driving innovation and firm performance. Measuring this asset is notoriously difficult. This paper applies a firm-level production function approach including, in…

International carbon markets are frequently propagated as an efficient instrument for reducing CO2 emissions. We argue that such markets, despite their desirable efficiency properties, might not be in the best…

How much information should governments reveal to consumers if consumption choices have uninternalized consequences to society? How does an alternative tax policy compare to information disclosure? We develop a…

This paper tests for the sensitivity of R&D to financing constraints conditional on restrictions in external financing. Financing constraints of firms are identified by an exogenously calculated rating index.…

We discuss important properties and pitfalls of panel-data event study designs. We derive three main results. First, binning of effect window endpoints is a practical necessity and key for identification of…

Based on a detailed model of the German tax-benefit system, this paper simulates private and fiscal returns to education for college graduates and college dropouts. Completing a five-year college degree is found…

In this paper, we investigate whether dynamic incentive schemes lead to a ratchet effect in a social dilemma. We test whether subjects strategically restrict their contribution levels at the beginning of a…