ZEW Discussion Papers

Rising political polarization generates significant negative externalities for democratic institutions and economic stability, yet scalable interventions to reduce polarization remain scarce. In this paper, I…

The advantages of adaptive experiments have led to their rapid adoption in economics, other fields, as well as among practitioners. However, adaptive experiments pose challenges for causal inference. This note…

How do retirees choose among home equity release products? Despite housing wealth being households’ largest asset, little is known about preferences for different equity release products. We conduct a survey…

We investigate whether firms engage in VAT evasion at the retail stage—typically a point of weakness in VAT systems—in a high-enforcement, low-informality setting. To measure evasion, we exploit a reform of VAT…

We evaluate a tax reform in Ecuador that introduced generous deductions from personal income taxes (PIT), encouraging consumers to request receipts. The reform addresses tax evasion by targeting small…

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effect of reverse-charge mechanism (RCM) implementation on VAT compliance using an overall, countrylevel measure of VAT compliance, the VAT gap. The VAT gap is…

In response to growing economic and environmental concerns, companies in a range of industries seek to repurpose products (assets) that retain functional capacity beyond their initial first life. This paper…

Women are significantly less likely to participate in the stock market than men. We show that financial socialization plays an important role in explaining this gap. Survey data from Germany and the U.S.…

Intangible assets have increasingly been identified as a main source of productivity gains. Since the pioneering work by Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel (2005), empirical research has largely focused on macro and…