1. Discussion and Working Paper // 2020

    Greta Thunberg und das Klimaproblem.Wie kann eine sozial-ökologische Transformation gelingen?

    With the Swedish student Greta Thunberg, the protest for the environment has taken on a personal face. Her central statement is: "Politicians are doing far too little for climate protection. This …

  2. ZEW policy brief No. 20-02 // 2020

    Covid-19 Crisis and the Expected Effects on R&D in Businesses

    The measures to slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus have brought large parts of the global economy to a standstill. This is likely to push Germany and many other countries into a deep recession in 2020. The…

  3. Refereed Journal // 2020

    Public Procurement of Innovation: Evidence from a German Legislative Reform

    Using public procurement to promote private innovation activities has attracted increasing attention recently. Germany implemented a legal change in its procurement framework in 2009, which allowed government…

  4. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-018 // 2020

    R&D Investment Under Financing Constraints

    This paper tests for the sensitivity of R&D to financing constraints conditional on restrictions in external financing. Financing constraints of firms are identified by an exogenously calculated rating index.…

  5. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-017 // 2020

    On Event Studies and Distributed-Lags in Two-Way Fixed Effects Models: Identification, Equivalence, and Generalization

    We discuss important properties and pitfalls of panel-data event study designs. We derive three main results. First, binning of effect window endpoints is a practical necessity and key for identification of…

  6. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-016 // 2020

    Fiscal and Individual Rates of Return to University Education With and Without Graduation

    Based on a detailed model of the German tax-benefit system, this paper simulates private and fiscal returns to education for college graduates and college dropouts. Completing a five-year college degree is found…

  7. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-015 // 2020

    The Ratchet Effect in Social Dilemmas

    In this paper, we investigate whether dynamic incentive schemes lead to a ratchet effect in a social dilemma. We test whether subjects strategically restrict their contribution levels at the beginning of a…

  8. Refereed Journal // 2020

    The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany

    We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on civic capital and economic performance, studying the case of the Stasi in East Germany. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and…

  9. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-014 // 2020

    A Small Volume Reduction that Melts Down the Market: Auctions with Endogenous Rationing

    Auctions with endogenous rationing have been introduced to stimulate competition. Such (procurement) auctions reduce the volume put out to tender when competition is low. This paper finds a strong negative…

  10. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-013 // 2020

    The Evolution of Inequality of Opportunity in Germany: A Machine Learning Approach

    We show that measures of inequality of opportunity (IOP) fully consistent with Roemer (1998)'s IOP theory can be straightforwardly estimated by adopting a machine learning approach, and apply our novel method to…

  11. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 20-012 // 2020

    The Value of Publicly Available, Textual and Non-textual Information For Startup Performance Prediction

    Can publicly available, web-scraped data be used to identify promising business startups at an early stage? To answer this question, we use such textual and non-textual information about the names of Danish…