Debating over efficiency-enhancing but inequality-increasing reforms accounts for the routine business of democratic institutions. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) hold that anti-reform bias can be attributed to individual-specific uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses resulting...

Modern macroeconomic models with a Keynesian flavour usually involve nominal rigidities in wages and commodity prices. A widely used conceptual framework is specifying a wage-setting and a price setting equation, while a more explicit microfoundation recurs to wage bargaining in the labour...

In this paper I analyze a vertically structured monopolized market with unionized firms. I compare two types of contracts: vertical integration and franchising. With franchising and wage bargaining at the firm level the union in the downstream firm is either very powerful or has no bargaining...

This paper estimates the effects of imports on employment, wages, and the wage share in Austria for the period of 1990-2005 using panel data of manufacturing industry. Imports are disaggregated according to their origin and as final vs. intermediate imports. There is evidence of significant...

This paper presents a statistical framework for estimating output-specific efficiencies for the 2-output case based upon a DEA frontier estimate. The key to the approach is the concept of target output-mix. Being usually unobserved, target output-mixes of firms are modelled as missing data....

Commodity prices are significantly more volatile than prices of industrial products. This extreme price instability establishes a need for futures markets in commodities. The main functions of futures trading being hedging against, and speculation on price fluctuations; and it is hedging, that...

In a simple oligopsonistic model, firms compete for labour through wages and job qualities. We modify the product market model developed by Vandenbosch/Weinberg 1995 and apply it to the job market with jobs being defined by two vertically differentiated non-wage characteristics. Workers differ...

This paper provides simulation evidence concerning some statistical properties of two different approaches to technical efficiency estimation for multiple-output production under noisy conditions: The Ray Frontier Approach (RFA) from Löthgren (1997) DEA+ proposed in Gstach (1996). RFA, unlike...

This article presents an econometric analysis of the maintenance costs for the Austrian railway system. The data contain observations of track maintenance costs from 1998 to 2000. Our analysis identifies the cost driving factors in order to determine estimates of marginal costs, as required by...

This paper estimates a labor demand equation based on the panel data of manufacturing industry in the Central and Eastern European Countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Romania) in order to test the effect of domestic factors (wages and...