ZEW Discussion Papers

This paper addresses the puzzle how employers that invest in general human capital can gain an information advantage with respect to the ability of their employees when training is certified by credible external…

This article investigates mean risk hedging with respect to limited liquidity and studies the impact of different risk measures on the hedging strategies. For motivation and application purposes hedging in…

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has become an influential player in the field of direct taxation in the European Union in the past twenty years. However, it is unclear whether the ECJ's decisions actually…

A sizeable literature studies whether governments strategically interact with each other through policy-diffusion, learning, fiscal and yardstick competition. This paper asks whether, in the presence of direct…

Contrary to previous literature we hypothesize that interests of labor may well – like that of shareholders – aim at securing the long-run survival of the firm. Consequently, employee representatives on the…

In 2013 the OECD introduced its Action Plan on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). One of the major concerns of this Plan is a strategic use of intangible assets as an instrument for profit shifting. The…

We develop an index that compares the quality of Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) applications by considering citations generated by International Search Reports (ISRs). In its most restrictive variation, i.e.…

This paper studies the importance of the socialization environment – nest – for the career destinations of early career researchers. In a sample of research groups in the fields of science and engineering at…

This paper employs firm-level panel data of 57 incumbent and entrant firms for 23 European countries in the decade from 2003 to 2012. We examine the impact of service- and facility-based competition on…