ZEW Discussion Papers

Actors in various settings have been increasingly relying on algorithmic tools to support their decision-making. Much of the public debate concerning algorithms - especially the associated regulation of new…

I examine the financial fragility of German households during the second wave of COVID-19 infections in the winter of 2020/21 by analyzing the households’ ability to come up with EUR 2,000 within one month.…

We study the labor demand effect of immigration on local labor markets by exploiting the fact that refugees in Germany are banned from working in the first few months after arrival. This natural experiment…

We examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the formation of energy conservation routines. To do so, we use data from two nationwide surveys of German households, conducted before and during the pandemic.…

We exploit proprietary information on severed correspondent banking relationships — due to the stricter enforcement of financial crime regulation — to assess how payment disruptions impede cross-border trade.…

We build a textual score measuring the tone of bank earnings press release documents. We use this measure to define bank manager sentiment as the variation in the textual tone score which is orthogonal to…

Due to the omnipresence of digital technologies in the economy, measuring firm digitalisation is of high importance. However, current indicators show several shortcomings, e.g., they lack timeliness and regional…

We study mechanism design with flexible but costly information acquisition. There is a principal and four or more agents, sharing a common prior over the set of payoff-relevant states. The principal proposes a…

This short article contributes to the Elgar Encyclopedia of Public Choice by summarizing the literature on the measurement of democracy. I proceed in two step. In the first part, I describe the classical…