ZEW Discussion Papers

Reputation indexes of employment protection have proven popular constructs in studies of the covariation of labor market institutions and macroeconomic outcomes. Portugal occupies an unenviable rank order in…

The paper investigates the business cycle relationships between the EU-15, the EU-11, as well as the EU-core countries for the period 1971 to 1997. Emphasis is put on the question whether there is a…

Concurrent taxation is a feature of many federal systems. As a consequence of this fact, the tax policy of one level of government affects the tax base of the other. This paper carries out a theoretical analysis…

In this paper, we test empirically for strategic behavior among the states using the cash support program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). To motivate the empirical work, we adapt Wildasin's [41]…

This paper demonstrates that insiders can erect barriers to entry and skim rents by sinking costs in human capital when labour markets are otherwise perfectlycontestable. The sunk costs nature of human capital…

This paper provides a labour supply explanation to the observation thatin Germany employment changes are asymmetric during the business cycle.Employment increases are slower, because the reservation wage of…

In the context of EMU fiscal equalization schemes have been proposed as a means to stabilize regions against asymmetric shocks. A theoretical analysis shows that besides reducing the cross-sectional income…

The paper deals with the question which determinants can explain regional differences in the number of start-ups in Austrian and Western German districts when observing the business related service sector. We…