ZEW Discussion Papers

Student performance of Germans and immigrants differed greatly in the 2000 PISA study. This paper analyses why the two groups of students performed so differently by estimating educational production…

This paper presents evidence on the development of educational attainment and its returns on the labor market in Germany in the time period 1985-2002. Returns to education are estimated using Mincer equations.…

This paper investigates how local jurisdictions in a federal system influence each other in the adoption of policy innovations. We look at school districts in Michigan and their participation in a public…

This paper analyses whether wages in Germany respond to firm-specific profitability conditions. Particular emphasis lies on the question of whether the extent of rent-sharing varies across different systems of…

This study analyses the competence gaps of lower-level managers in a typical manufacturing plant in Germany that had recently introduced a teamwork structure. Results indicate that the managers have…

In Germany, the medium-term financial planning (“Mifrifi”) was introduced at the end of the sixties. This study scrutinizes the experience of the German Bund with more than thirty years of financial planning. …

A simple model of yardstick competition between jurisdictions is presented. Governments of jurisdictions face the alternative to choose between an old and a new policy with stochastic payoffs. The new policy…

The education variable in the IAB employment subsample has two shortcomings: missing values and inconsistencies with the reporting rule. We propose several deductive imputation procedures to improve the…

Before making di±cult decisions, individuals tend to collect information on decision makers in reference groups. With respect to policy innovations in a decentralized public sector, this may give rise to…