ZEW Discussion Papers

Firms are affected by the product demand. This leads to employment adjustments. On the internal labour market there exist two prominent possibilities, changes of working hours, especially overtime, and…

Even though wage inequality in West Germany started to rise at the top of the wage distribution in the 1980s, this rise was delayed for about ten years at the bottom. Our paper investigates the changes in the…

Economists think that unemployment is an important cause for crime. From the theoretical point of view, this belief seems to be reasonable, since, according to the standard economic theory of crime by Nobel…

In recent decades, German industry-level bargaining has often been blamed for the deterioration of firms’ competitiveness, as centrally negotiated wages are perceived to be particularly harmful to those firms…

The role of information and communication technologies (ICT) as a driving force for productivity and competitiveness is in the meanwhile well recognized. A look at the country level, however, reveals that the…

Over the last decade, industrialized economies have experienced a dramatic increase in their expenditures on information and communication technologies (ICT) and there is broad evidence indicating that the…

Despite the continuing political interest in the usefulness of tax competition and tax coordination as well as the wealth of theoretical analyses, it still remains open whether or when tax competition is…

The economic literature has provided robust evidence indicating that the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) has positively affected productivity at aggregate and firm levels. Given the…

This paper characterizes a firm’s optimal offer of service plans in a monopoly market. In this market only informed customers know already at the contracting stage whether their demand is high or low, while…