ZEW Discussion Papers

We study the welfare effects of school district consolidation, i.e. the integration of disjoint school districts into a centralised clearinghouse. We show theoretically that, in the worst-case scenario, district…

Is trade liberalization contributing to cleaner production amongst manufacturing firms? Theoretical predictions and empirical evidences are mixed. This study utilizes China’s dual trade regime and China’s…

In a recent paper, Bloom et al. (2020) find evidence for a substantial decline in research productivity in the U.S. economy during the last 40 years. In this paper, we replicate their findings for China and…

Although merger and acquisitions (M&As) are acknowledged as an important means to access innovative assets and know-how, firms’ inventive output often declines in the post-M&A period. Financial, managerial and…

What are the effects of austerity on distributional policy? We exploit the autonomy of Italian municipalities in setting non-linear income taxes and the exogenous introduction of a fiscal rule to show that…

Who benefits from the evasion of value added taxes (VAT)? Using a reform that enforced VAT on previously non-compliant large retailers in Armenia, we estimate a onethird passthrough of the tax burden on prices.…

We use car-level micro data to provide empirical evidence on the usage of conventional and electric vehicles (EVs) in private and car sharing fleets in Germany. We shed light on both monetary and non-monetary…

Birth rates differ strongly across European states, despite the deep economic har-monisation process related to European integration. This study uses large scale ad-ministrative data from France and Germany to…

This paper investigates the long-term effects of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) on intimate partner violence. The identification of these causal effects relies on a novel historical dataset from which I exploit…