ZEW Discussion Papers

Regional economic prospects to some extent seem to hinge on the region’s human capital endowment and, thus, its ability to attract skilled labour. For any related policy, it is thus important to better…

No matter how well resourced, innovation efforts are prone to failure. This paper investigates how the allocation of resources to product innovation projects allows firms to cope with this challenge. We assume…

Trust is an essential ingredient of social life. But trust is not considered an essential ingredient in the models of selfish behavior on which modern economic theory is built. In the present study, we …

In many markets, firms are interlocked by the fact that either firms own shares of each other, or investors own shares of several competitors in the very same market. In this context, partial ownership is the…

The massive economic crisis 2008/09 had substantial impacts on the innovation activities of the German economy. The loss in sales and profits resulted in a sharp decline of innovation expenditure. While capital…

Vertical integration of electricity distribution network operator and electricity supplier is a key issue in European energy markets, in particular since the European Commission (EC) has initiated a sector…

German electricity submarkets for residential customers have been liberalized by the end of the 1990s. Since then a large number of new providers has entered former monopolistic markets, which are first and…

Although the pricing dynamics of hardcore cartels have been studied intensively from a theoretical perspective, empirical evidence is still rare. We combine publicly available data with a unique private data set…

Cartel detection is usually viewed as a key task of either competition authorities or compliance officials in firms with an elevated risk of cartelization. We argue that customers of hard core cartels can have…