ZEW Discussion Papers

Problem Definition: We consider a buyer that needs to source a fixed quantity. She faces several potential suppliers that might fail to deliver. The buyer conducts a procurement auction to determine contract…

We analyze the evolution of the wage structure in East Germany over the past two decades and compare it to West Germany. Both regions experienced a rise in wage inequality between 1995 and 2009 with wage…

Do women invest differently than men? We contribute to the answer of this question by analysing the Panel on Household Finances (PHF) of the German Bundesbank. This representative panel collects a wide variety…

A central motivating factor for studying price markups is their effect on consumer welfare. Reported estimates of (firm-level) price markups in the literature, however, are often focused on industry or…

Despite some advantages over traditional (offline) labor markets – such as lower search costs, better matching and improved monitoring – online labor markets (OLMs) have not taken off as initially expected. In…

We employ proprietary data from a large bank to analyze how – in times of crisis – depositors react to a bank nationalization, re-privatization and an accompanying increase in deposit insurance. Nationalization…

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has made all the more clear that public health is a public good. Public health interventions try to encourage contributions to this public good. Digital public health interventions are…

This paper analyzes a market in which two horizontally differentiated firms compete by setting menus of two-part tariffs, and in which some consumers are not informed about the linear per-unit price component.…

We describe a new mechanism - what we call a booster draft - for allocating multiple, indivisible objects among a group of individuals. The mechanism’s appeal lies in its strategy-proofness and simplicity:…