ZEW Discussion Papers

Firms in developed countries face increasing shortages of young workers. This paper studies the importance of young workers, particularly vocational trainees, for firm technology investments. Leveraging…

Companies across industries face increasing pressure to assess the costs of decarbonizing their operations. This paper develops a generic model for constructing abatement cost curves in connection with carbon…

Governments can support the green transition through green public procurement. Despite its strategic importance, the impact of this policy on firms remains unclear. Using US data, this paper provides the first…

The Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) of 1968 was focused on highlighting, and ultimately reducing, poverty in the United States. As part of the campaign, protestors from across the country were transported to…

Smoking bans have been widely implemented, despite mixed evidence on their effectiveness in reducing firsthand smoking. This paper provides novel insights into the dynamic impacts of smoking bans in the context…

This study investigates how crises affect firms’ adoption of frontier technologies using the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study. The analysis tracks the nature, timing, and pandemic-related motivations of…

We study the implications of services trade for firm innovation. Using a quasi-experimental shift-share design, we find that access to foreign knowledge-related services improves the innovativeness of domestic…

This paper investigates the impact of Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) and Research and Development (R&D) grants on firms' R&D investment using data from Belgian R&D-active firms over the past decade. Our…

Governments increasingly use nudges to improve tax collection. We synthesize the growing literature that evaluates nudging experiments using meta-analytical methods. We find that simple reminders increase the…