ZEW Discussion Papers

Although natural hazard insurance is advocated as an important means of risk management, private insurance demand often remains below critical levels. Prior loss experience and the design of governmental relief…

We analyze a monopolist who offers different variants of a possibly dangerous product to heterogeneous customers. Product variants are distinguished by different safety attributes. Customers choose product usage…

In this paper we explore the relationship between innovative firms that patent technology related to Industry 4.0 and their economic performance. By applying the new patent cartography developed by the EPO that…

This paper studies whether political budget cycles occur in public procurement in the European Union. Using project- level data from Tenders Electronic Daily (2008-2018), I analyze different steps along the…

Hidden Champions (HCs) are small- and medium-sized global market leaders that repeatedly show superior innovation capabilities and economic performance. However, empirical evidence on how the digital…

We develop a novel empirical approach to identify the effectiveness of policies against a pandemic. The essence of our approach is the insight that epidemic dynamics are best tracked over stages, rather than…

Like many other countries, Germany has experienced rapid population and workforce ageing, yet with substantial variation across regions. In this paper we first use this spatial variation between 1975 and 2014 to…

This paper studies responses to high-stakes incentives arising from early ability tracking. We use three complementary research designs exploiting differences in school track admission rules at the end of…

We compile biographical information on more than 5,000 Prussian politicians and exploit newly digitized administrative data to examine whether landowning and landless elites differ in the extent to which they…