ZEW Discussion Papers

Maternity unit closures are increasingly common in areas with low birth rates, resulting in diminished competition between units. We examine how competition affects the quality and amenities of the remaining…

We study firm responses to local policies through a survey experiment, providing randomized information on the competitiveness of business tax rates and highway access in their headquarters’ municipality. Firms…

Educational tracking—separating students into tracks or schools by ability — is commonplace, but access and preferences for top programs often depend on socioeconomic status (SES), reinforcing inequality. We…

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have become a key antipoverty policy in Latin America in the last 25 years. The ultimate goal of this kind of programs is to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty…

We examine the welfare effects of removing explicit and implicit fossil fuel subsidies, the latter entailing Pigouvian pricing of local externalities from fossil energy consumption. We map a multi-region,…

Public procurement offers sizable market opportunities for young firms. We investigate the firm- and founder-level characteristics determining young firms’ decision to apply for public tenders, as well as the…

This paper introduces the WebAI paradigm as a promising approach for innovation studies, business analytics, and informed policymaking. By leveraging artificial intelligence to systematically analyze…

We study Germany’s photovoltaic (PV) subsidy program, estimating a dynamic model of new technology adoption which accounts for heterogeneity in residential ownership structures. We find that homeowner and…

Many European companies face the challenge of lowering CO2 emissions from their company car fleets. A promising lever is to increase the notoriously low electric usage of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles…