This Discussion Paper deals with the issue of greenwashing, i.e. the false portrayal of companies as environmentally friendly. The analysis focuses on the US metal industry, which is a major emission source of sulfur dioxide (SO2), one of the most harmful air pollutants. One way to monitor the...

In this paper, we introduce the concept of a Digital Layer to empirically investigate inter-firm relations at any geographical scale of analysis. The Digital Layer is created from large-scale, structured web scraping of firm websites, their textual content and the hyperlinks among them. Using...

While the effects of non-geographic aggregation on inference are well studied in economics, research on geographic aggregation is rather scarce. This knowledge gap together with the use of aggregated spatial units in previous firm location studies result in a lack of understanding of firm...

In dieser ZEW-Kurzanalyse analysieren die Autoren/-innen die Webseiten von circa 1,1 Millionen deutschen Unternehmen zwei Mal wöchentlich auf die Nennung des Wortes "Corona" und entsprechender Synonyme. Anschließend werden die identifizierten Textstellen mittels KI-Textanalysemodellen...

Baden-Württemberg gehört zu den führenden Wirtschafts- und Innovationsstandorten in Deutschland und Europa. Dazu leisten sowohl Großunternehmen wie auch der gewach-sene und breite Mittelstand (hidden champions) einen entscheidenden Beitrag. In den letzten Jahren zeigte sich allerdings eine...

Nowadays, almost all (relevant) firms have their own websites which they use to publish information about their products and services. Using the example of innovation in firms, we outline a framework for extracting information from firm websites using web scraping and data mining. For this...

This paper investigates the micro-location pattern of innovative and non-innovative firms in Berlin using detailed information on the firms' addresses and their local environment. The study employs a unique, representative panel data set of Berlin-based firms from manufacturing and services...

Innovation is considered as a main driver of economic growth. Promoting the development of innovation through STI (science, technology and innovation) policies requires accurate indicators of innovation. Traditional indicators often lack coverage, granularity as well as timeliness and involve...