ZEW Discussion Papers

The official view on ECB monetary policy claims that monetary decisions are based solely on average data for the euro zone and that diverging regional developments are disregarded. However, experience from…

Using information on family background, we estimate returns to education, allowing for the heterogeneity of returns. In order to control for the unobserved heterogeneity shared by family members, we construct…

The system of banking supervision in Europe is undergoing substantial reforms. According to Stigler's capture theory regulation often follows the preferences of producers. Therefore, the interests of the…

Several recent papers have shown the relevance of collective models for the empirical investigation of household labor supply and consumption. Yet the estimation of collective models in the presence of …

We propose four different GMM estimators that allow almost consistent estimation of the structural parameters of panel probit models with fixed effects for the case of small T and large N. The moments used are…

This paper compares technologies across space and time on the basis of factual and counterfactual substitution elasticities and argues that differences in estimated substitution elasticities should be decomposed…

This paper deals with a special type of voluntary approach to protect the environment, for example, that we would like to term voluntary commitment. Its major characteristic is that it represents a unilateral…

A quota on foreign competition will generally lead to quality-upgrading (downgrading) of the low-quality (high-quality) firm, an increase in average quality, a reduction of quality differentiation, and a…