ZEW Discussion Papers

The present paper deals with the question whether "Gibrat's law" is applicable to firms founded between 1989 and 1996 within the Western German manufacturing sector or not. The underlying assumption is that size…

While the potential merits of the German apprenticeship training system seem to be fairly well documented, relatively little is known about those youths who, at one point or another, do not follow the usual…

The paper constructs an asymmetric information model to investigate the efficiency and equity cases for government mandated benefits. A mandate can improve workers' insurance, and may also redistribute in favor…

In the following we will discuss the "mapping of innovative clusters in national innovation systems". For this we have used a data set of almost 3.000 firms that participated in the first and fifth survey of the…

The labor supply of West German married and cohabiting couples is analyzed using a discrete choice model. Following van Soest (1995), the labor supply decision is based on a household utility function which is…

The principal justification for minimum wage legislation resides in improving the economic condition of low-wage workers. Most previous analyses of the distributional effects of minimum wages have been confined…

In this paper we investigate the process of job search, using a unique, large-scale data set for Portugal that allows us to assess the effect of job search methods on escape rates from unemployment and, in a new…

In dem Beitrag wird der Beschäftigungseffekt infolge einer aufkommensneutralen Senkung der Sozialversicherungsbeiträge simuliert. Zu diesem Zweck werden fünf unterschiedliche ökonomische Modelle verwendet,…

We argue that in labor markets with central wage bargaining wage flexibility varies systematically across the wage distribution: local wage flexibility is more relevant for the upper part of the wage…