ZEW Discussion Papers

Human capital contracts give private investors the right to a share of students' future earnings in return for a financial contribution during their studies. Although still rarely used, human capital contracts…

The effects of childbirth on future labor market outcomes are a key issue for policy discussion. This paper implements a dynamic treatment approach to estimate the effect of having the first child now versus…

The 2008-09 crisis has shown that some euro area member countries were unable to sufficiently stabilize their economies which has given rise to a debate about deeper fiscal integration in Europe. In this paper,…

This paper evaluates the effects of a major Swedish school choice reform. The reform in 1992 increased school choice and competition among public schools as well as through a large-scale introduction of private…

This North-South model of Schumpeterian endogenous growth combines a market, productivity and knowledge effect. A set of various convergent and divergent growth paths is derived that is much richer than in the…

We scrutinize the impact of international productivity gains (spillovers) induced by imports and exports on optimal tariffs. First, we solve a stylized 2x2 trade model of a large open economy and show that (a)…

We hypothesize that North-South trade is associated with knowledge spillovers that create labor productivity gains depending on various determinants of Southern absorptive capacity. We use the novel World…

The iron and steel industry is one of the most carbon emitting and energy consuming sectors in Europe. At the same time this sector is of high economic importance for the European Union. Therefore, while public…

The aim of this paper is to assess the dimension of factors and shocks that drive financial conditions, and in particular financial stress in the euro area. A second aim is to construct summary indices on the…