ZEW Discussion Papers

Energy efficiency regulation is an important driver for innovations in environmental technologies. Improvements of energy efficiency do not only contribute to reach environmental policy targets, they can be…

In many countries, apprenticeship training plays a major role for school leavers to enter the labour market. Despite the importance of the apprenticeship degree, dropout of apprenticeship training is frequent:…

Energy efficiency improvements, i.e. a more prudent use of scarce and polluting resources while simultaneously maintaining a certain level of output, are considered one of the most promising measures to meet…

Informational asymmetries abound in anonymous markets, such as those opening in the internet almost every day. In particular, before trading takes place, the typical buyer does not know whether her anonymous…

We investigate the opposing impacts of two basic effects underlying the decision to patent: the protective and the disclosure effect. On the one hand, patents grant a temporary monopoly to an inventor, and thus,…

While there is no doubt that tax evasion is widespread in developing countries, exact measures of its extent are difficult to obtain because, by definition, tax evasion is hidden. However, such estimates are…

Fuel poverty may become an increasingly severe problem in developed countries in cases when real prices for fossil fuels increase at high rates or when real energy prices increase due to policies for greenhouse…

The public debate on tax base erosion by multinational enterprises (MNEs) has been stirred up by strikingly low effective tax rates (ETRs) of some very prominent US-American information technology companies.…