Bücher der Reihe ZEW Economic Studies

This volume addresses the attractiveness of financial centers with a primary focus on the mutual fund industry. It uses different empirical analysis approaches in an attempt to disentangle the reasons for location attractiveness and in order to identify its influence on fund pricing.

In January 2005, the German government enacted a substantial reform of the welfare system, the so-called "Hartz IV reform". It investigates whether a centralized or decentralized organization of welfare administration is more successful to integrate welfare recipients into employment.

As the residential buildings sector accounts for around 30 percent of the final energy demand in Germany, this sector is increasingly becoming the focus of public attention with regard to climate change.

Focusing on the ongoing integration process in the euro area and the EU, it analyses the integration process that has taken place since the 1980s and which is marked by the advent of the euro and the substantial enlargement that resulted from the accession of 12 new Member States in East and Southern Europe.

The process of firms' growth - in terms of productivity or employment - is a major concern of policy makers. Does innovation lead to an increase in employment growth? Does innovation boost labour productivity? Does innovation in one period improve innovation performance in subsequent periods?

This book offers a comprehensive empirical analysis of continuing vocational training in Germany. Wage and productivity effects of training are analyzed, explicitly accounting for the heterogeneity of training participants. In addition, evidence is given on whether positive externalities of continuing training exist.

This book analyses the employment effects of job creation schemes for participating individuals in Germany. International evidence on their effectiveness suggests that programs should be targeted to the needs of the unemployed and should be offered early in the period of unemployment.

Corporate valuation using multiples is one of the most popular corporate valuation approaches. In this book, the different steps of this valuation approach such as the selection of comparable companies or the choice of the reference variables are discussed. Finally, it is shown how multi-factor models can enrich the universe of valuation models.

Over the past fifteen years, the optimal enforcement of EU competition law has become a major concern. This book contains a unique collection of articles by lawyers and economists on current issues in the public and private enforcement of competition law. Public enforcement has been strengthened in numerous ways ¿ for example, through the introduction of a leniency programme and a substantial increase in fines for competition law violations. At the same time the EU Commission has been promoting private enforcement ¿ for example, by developing a legal framework that grants victims of EU antitrust law infringements access to compensation.The contributions in this book address a range of topics in the area of competition law enforcement, including the role of fines and leniency programmes in public enforcement; access to evidence and the quantification of damages in private enforcement; and the interaction between public and private enforcement of competition law in Europe.

The book provides methods and results from major European and American studies evaluating both social costs of transport and first experiences with their internalization in different contexts: infrastructure planning, urban road pricing and highway tolling.

As the Kyoto conference of the parties on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change once again underscored, man-made climate change has become one of the major challenges to our generation and many generations to come.

The recent development of endogenous growth theories has renewed the in terest into the sources of productivity growth of the advanced industrialized economies.

This study analyzes the international activities of British start-up companies in high-technology industries. It supports a resource-based perspective since the proxies for transaction cost-based arguments and the internationalization process theory are of limited explanatory power.

Gaining insights into the German innovation system and the institutional framework is as important to policy making as is data on the endowment of the German economy with factors fostering innovation and their recent development.

Most governments in today's market economies spend significant sums of money on labour market programmes.

The European Commission envisages putting forward a proposal for a tax reform that would allow improving the efficiency and simplicity of the corporate income tax systems. This report assesses the impact of a Common Corporate Tax Base (CCTB) on the size of the corporate tax bases of EU companies.

Innovation-oriented environmental regulation is extremely attractive for policy planners and decision makers, since it is expected that innovations can cut costs of environmental measures and overcome existing trade-offs between economic and ecological goals.

Proceedings of an International Conference held at Stuttgart, Germany, July 27-28, 1999

Empirical and theoretical evidence on the German service sector is inversely related to its growing overall importance for the entire economy.

subsequent adoption of an innovation design preferred in the lead market by other countries, can be put down to the special market context in the lead market.

ZhongXiang Zhang (East-West Center, Honolulu) uses a global model based on marginal abatement cost curves for 12 world regions to estimate the contributions of the three flexibility mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol, i.

Most of the studies are part of the re search project "Working hours flexibility and employment" (Arbeitszeitjlexi bilisierung und Beschiijtigung) which was conducted at the Centre for Euro pean Economic Research (ZEW) with financial support by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

Sustainable development, climate policy, biodiversity conservation - all these represent flash points at the intersection of environmental science, economics, and public policy.

This doctoral dissertation, submitted to the University of Mannheim, was written during my employment as a research fellow at the Zentrum fiir Europaische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW - Centre for European Economic Research) in Mann­ heim. My work profited very much from the fruitful environment provided by the ZEW and particularly by the Department of Labour Markets, Human Resources and Social Policy. I am very grateful to my advisor, Professor Wolfgang Franz, for his support and inspiration. I am also indebted to Friedhelm Pfeiffer for encouraging me to work on the topicoftransition from unemployment to self-employment. Also, Part IIIof this study gained very much from the joint work with FriedheIm Pfeiffer. Fur­ thermore, I am much obliged to Professor JosefBniderl for evaluating this disser­ tation. I would like to thank the "Forderverein Wissenschaft und Praxis am Zentrum fiir Europaische Wirtschaftsforschung e.V." for financial support of part of this study. My work also benefited from the comments and the help of numerous people other than those mentioned above. Knowing that the list of acknowledgement is incomplete, I would like to thank Professor Francois Laisney and Matthias Almus for their valuable comments on the selection models, Professor William Greene for his helpful remarks on the bivariate probit model, Professor John Ham and an anonymous referee for their very valuable comments on preliminary work of this study, and Joachim Keller, Jens Kohlberger and Yibo Ren for providing excellent research assistance. Obviously, all remaining errors are my own responsibility.

An empirical analysis of the factors that determine the employment impact of environmental innovations. In addition to the empirical study based on interviews, case studies from five selected business sectors are used to provide profound insight in the environmental innovation behaviour of the firms.

Nevertheless, we are convinced that our seemingly minor changes will set the budget on a path towards a more rational European budget which, in the end, will create leeway for financing European policies with a true European value added.

In spite of the widespread use of the concept of potential output in economic theory and empirical applications as well as in economic policy debates, the historical background and the assumptions inherent to this concept are rarely made transparent, let alone critically questioned.

Competition policy is an integral and prominent part of economic policy-making in the European Union. More precisely, the goal of EU competition policy is "to defend and develop effective competition in the common market" (European Commission, 2000: 7).

In the presence of a skill bias in labor demand, which increases the relative de mand for more highly skilled labor over time, there only seems to exist the choice between higher wage inequality or higher unemployment rates.