Providing recently laid offworkers with cash benefits may help them overcome mobility costs and thereby stimulate labor mobility. On the other hand, cash benefits may dampen the employment shock and reduce the incentive to move. In this paper, we test these two competing mechanisms against each...

Medical spending is highly concentrated at the end of life and varies widely across patients, raising a first-order welfare question about whether marginal end-of-life spending reflects waste or generates meaningful benefits. Using Austrian administrative data, we document that endof- life...

National payroll data reveal that men are paid more than women when they enter firms in Great Britain. Although this hiring wage gap has narrowed over the past two decades, it still accounts for over two-thirds of the steady-state gender pay gap – the wage gap that would eventually...

Bessel's correction adjusts the denominator in the sample variance formula from n to n − 1 to produce an unbiased estimator for the population variance. This paper includes rigorous derivations, geometric interpretations, and visualizations. It then introduces the concept of "bariance," an...

Patient selection remains a major challenge in evaluating hospital performance. We exploit the quasi-random assignment of patients to hospitals, based on a rotation schedule between hospitals in the Upper Austrian capital of Linz. In the instrumental variable (IV) framework, we use high-quality...

This paper reveals a new determinant of wage markdowns at the firm level, namely, the product scope. Using matched employer-employee data on Danish manufacturing firms, we document a negative elasticity between wages and firm scope, which is of a similar magnitude but opposite sign as the...

Using high-quality administrative data from Upper Austria, we analyze the effect of hospital crowding on patients' short- and medium-term healthcare utilization and labor market outcomes. Focusing on acute inpatient diagnoses, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in daily diagnosis-related...

Consumers increasingly value the environmental and social responsibility of the production processes used by firms, yet these processes often remain unobservable, even after consumption. In this paper, we develop a simple model to examine firms’ technology choices and subsequent price...

The relationship between parenthood and gendered labor market outcomes has been extensively studied, with the 'child penalty'-defined as the effect of having children on mothers' labor earnings relative to their partners'-documented in many countries. While prior research has explored...

Background: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss among workingage adults, with early detection and regular screening being critical for prevention. In Austria, DR screening is conducted opportunistically, lacking the systematic approach seen in other countries. This study...