ZEW Discussion Papers

Drawing on a large-scale German Linked Employer- Employee data set, this paper studies the extent to which employers insure workers against firm-level shocks. Particular emphasis is given to the question of…

A sizeable literature reports that financial market analysts and forecasters herd for reputational reasons (See e.g. Devenow and Welch (1996) and Hirshleifer and Teoh (2003) for surveys). As an example, Lamont…

New firms are regarded to be of substantial importance for the development of an economy, especially for innovation, growth, and the creation of jobs. However, new firms also face a high risk of failure. Thus,…

Company-wide packages of enterprise software for planning and controlling business processes, referred to as enterprise systems, are widely used in many different industries throughout many countries around…

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…