ZEW Discussion Papers

This paper studies whether political budget cycles occur in public procurement in the European Union. Using project- level data from Tenders Electronic Daily (2008-2018), I analyze different steps along the…

We develop a novel empirical approach to identify the effectiveness of policies against a pandemic. The essence of our approach is the insight that epidemic dynamics are best tracked over stages, rather…

Like many other countries, Germany has experienced rapid population and workforce ageing, yet with substantial variation across regions. In this paper we first use this spatial variation between 1975 and…

This paper studies responses to high-stakes incentives arising from early ability tracking. We use three complementary research designs exploiting differences in school track admission rules at the end of…

Hidden Champions (HCs) are small- and medium-sized global market leaders that repeatedly show superior innovation capabilities and economic performance. However, empirical evidence on how the digital…

We compile biographical information on more than 5,000 Prussian politicians and exploit newly digitized administrative data to examine whether landowning and landless elites differ in the extent to which…

In response to discussions about large multinational enterprises’ tax planning activities, legislators around the world have adopted numerous regulations to increase corporate tax transparency. New…

Although a relevant share of firms is created out of unemployment and current active labor market policies in Europe often subsidize unemployed individuals to start their own businesses, little is known…

In this paper, employing transaction level data for Russian imports, we explore the role of multi-product shipments in explaining shipping patterns across countries. First, we document that firms from more…