ZEW Discussion Papers

Digital designs – that is, designs for display on electronic screens – have recently burst onto the intellectual property (IP) stage. While in the U.S. a smattering of legal studies have recently addressed the…

This paper discusses the impact and the appropriateness of tax incentives for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union. First, we provide a survey of implemented tax incentives…

Monitoring by institutional investors can act as an important mechanism to promote firm innovation. By investigating Chinese listed firms’ patenting between 2002 and 2011, we find that the presence of…

Over the last decade Germany has boosted renewable energy in power production by means of massive subsidies. The flip side are very high electricity prices which raises concerns that the transition cost towards…

Over the last decade, a large body of tax accounting literature on the association between book-tax conformity (BTC)/book-tax differences (BTD) and firms’ opportunistic reporting behavior has emerged. Yet,…

We use a dataset of 615 firms which participated in 114 illegal cartels – convicted by the European Commission between 1999 and 2016 – to investigate the determinants of the duration of a firm’s participation in…

This paper examines how local governments adjust their spending, savings and taxes in response to a temporary revenue windfall generated by a housing boom and how they cope with the inevitable shortfall that…

Missing values are a major problem in all econometric applications based on survey data. A standard approach assumes data are missing-at-random and uses imputation methods, or even listwise deletion. This…

We study the effect of a subtle change in the choice architecture on offsetting behavior. In a large-scale field experiment, we examine repeated voluntary contributions to a carbon offsetting program during the…