ZEW Discussion Papers

In this study, we analyze the cyclicality of fiscal policies in China during the period 1978-2013. We find that the cyclicality of local government spending in China significantly affects the cyclicality of…

Cycles play an important role when analyzing market phenomena. In many markets, both overlaying (weekly, seasonal or business cycles) and time-varying cycles (e.g. asymmetric lengths of peak and off peak or…

Due to being much better documented, legal cartels have recently attracted the interest of many researchers who aim to understand the functioning of illegal cartels in detail. This paper contributes to the…

In the context of yardstick regulation with long-lived assets, the influence of heterogeneous investment cycles on the ability to recover capital is found to be important. The application of efficient firm…

In June 2008, the European Commission (EC) was enabled to introduce a settlement procedure that aims at promoting the procedural efficiency of cartel enforcement in the European Union (EU). We use a data set…

The duration of merger proceedings held by competition authorities is an important determinant of the efficiency of the entire merger control process. We use a dataset of 2953 Phase I and 92 Phase II…

We study competition in the German interurban bus industry two years after its liberalization in January 2013. In addition to a brief characterization of the liberalization process and several general market…

We provide an empirical assessment of the German interurban bus industry two years after its deregulation in January 2013. In addition to a general description of key developments of the industry, we use a…

We study the welfare effects of non-binding advance price announcements. Applying a differentiated Bertrand model with horizontal products and asymmetric information, we find that such announcements can help…