ZEW Discussion Papers

We document a causal influence of online user-generated information on realworld economic outcomes. In particular, we conduct a randomized field experiment to test whether additional information on Wikipedia…

This paper studies the question whether skill-biased technical change diffuses internationally and that way contributes to the increasing relative skill demand in other countries. So far, the role of…

Mobile information and communication technologies (ICT) have started to diffuse rapidly in the business sector. This study tests for the complementarity between the use of mobile ICT and organizational practices…

This paper analyses the relevance of information and communication technologies (ICT) for firms' probability of global sourcing of inputs. Using firm-level data from Germany in 2009, which include mainly small…

We estimate the effects of student employment on academic performance. Performance is measured by grades achieved one and a half years after entering university. We use the amount of financial aid students…

Many studies have estimated the effect of circumstances on income acquisition. Perhaps surprisingly, the fraction of inequality attributable to circumstances is usually quite small - in the advanced democracies,…

This article investigates how a firm's financial strength affcts its dynamic decision to invest in R&D. We estimate a dynamic model of R&D choice using data for German firms in high-tech manufacturing…

Corporate tax levels have fallen substantially in Europe during the last decades. A broad literature has identified tax competition as one reason for this decline in corporate tax levels. However, none of these…

This paper exploits detailed information on local political and socioeconomic networks and a reform of local fiscal equalization in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) to identify the role of learning in local tax rate…