ZEW Discussion Papers

Ten years after the initial Climate Change Convention from Rio in 1992, the developed world is likely to ratify the Kyoto Protocol which has been celebrated as a milestone in climate protection. Standard…

This paper investigates the economic impacts of environmental tax reforms designed to reach given emission reduction targets for the German economy. Our focus is on the efficiency and employment implications…

High performance workplace practices were extolled as an efficient means to increase firm productivity. The empirical evidence is disputed, however. To assess the productivity effects of a broad variety of…

This paper aims at formulating a theoretical model of educational attainment which is directly implementable empirically. The conceptual frame-work relies on the human capital theory, where individuals weigh…

Although in its infancy, one promising application of Internet technology for firms is so-called Internet commerce or electronic commerce. This paper analyses the determinants of B2B (business-to-business)…

This paper analyses the impact of public innovation subsidies on private innovation expenditure. In the empirical economic literature there is still no common support for the hypothesis of either a…

The paper examines the role of the vertical structure of the public sector for economic growth in Germany in a long–term perspective. A theoretical model shows that, due to spillover effects of public service…

The financial and non-financial involvement of venture capitalists is supposed to be positively correlated with firm performance. This paper deals with the evaluation of the impact of venture capitalists on…

This paper presents a methodology to identify net demand shocks as well as wage rigidities in heterogeneous labor markets on the basis of nonparametric regression. We show how this approach can be used to make…