ZEW Discussion Papers

In its current setup, the European Union is often characterised as slow, decision-impeding, inefficient and therefore not really ready for enlargement. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis and the…

Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry…

In a randomized experiment embedded in a survey, I test the effects of variations in question wording and format on consumer response behavior and the corresponding inflation expectations. To this end, survey…

We study how connections to German federal parliamentarians affect firm dynamics by constructing a novel dataset to measure connections between politicians and the universe of firms. To identify the causal…

By international comparison as well as compared to other EU policies, the EU‘s Cohesion Policy (CP) evaluation system is far developed and institutionalized. This paper analyses the remaining gaps and…

I analyze a model of directed search in which a consumer inspects a finite number of products sharing attributes with each others. The consumer discovers her valuation for the attributes of the inspected…

The consumer search literature mostly considers independently distributed products. In contrast, I study a model of directed search with infinitely many products whose valuations are correlated through shared…

The Flemish government launched its Spearhead Cluster (SHC) policy in 2017. The aim is to boost strategic sectors by setting up cluster initiatives which coordinate collaborative R&D initiatives. In this paper,…

Many governments operate consumer debt relief programs, often timed to match the election cycle, but their political effects are not well understood. We ask if debt relief can influence elections in democracies.…