ZEW Discussion Papers

Academic research and policy makers in the Euro area are currently concerned with the threat of debt deflation and secular stagnation in Europe. Empirical evidence seems to suggest that secular stagnation and…

Seit der Unternehmensteuerreform 2008/2009 haben sich die steuerlichen Rahmenbedingungen in Deutschland im Grundsatz nicht geändert. Eine Analyse der deutschen Steuerpolitik in der laufenden Legislaturperiode…

This paper investigates the impact of the financial crisis on investment decisions in innovative versus non-innovative firms. Firms are defined as being innovative if they have introduced a new product to the…

In this study, we analyze the cyclicality of fiscal policies in China during the period 1978-2013. We find that the cyclicality of local government spending in China significantly affects the cyclicality of…

Cycles play an important role when analyzing market phenomena. In many markets, both overlaying (weekly, seasonal or business cycles) and time-varying cycles (e.g. asymmetric lengths of peak and off peak or…

Due to being much better documented, legal cartels have recently attracted the interest of many researchers who aim to understand the functioning of illegal cartels in detail. This paper contributes to the…

In the context of yardstick regulation with long-lived assets, the influence of heterogeneous investment cycles on the ability to recover capital is found to be important. The application of efficient firm…

In June 2008, the European Commission (EC) was enabled to introduce a settlement procedure that aims at promoting the procedural efficiency of cartel enforcement in the European Union (EU). We use a data set…

The duration of merger proceedings held by competition authorities is an important determinant of the efficiency of the entire merger control process. We use a dataset of 2953 Phase I and 92 Phase II…