The concept of debit and credit balances implies that the state's financing deficit can be reduced only when the business sector and the foreign sector at the same time assume more debts or when private households reduce their surplus. This working paper investigates how economic policy can...

In 2004 the Republic of Slovenia entered the European Union and, as a matter of principle, was guaranteed the four freedoms (free trans-national mobility of goods, services, capital and labour). From an economic viewpoint, this guarantee should provide the required institutional framework to...

We use recent advances in the statistical analysis of Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions for non-linear models to analyse the contribution of individual variables to total gender differences in participation and duration of training. Results suggest that effects stemming from the intra-household...

The EU Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) is a key instrument in European climate policy. Evidence from the first trading period (2005-2007) and the first year of the Kyoto period 2008 dampened, however, ex-ante enthusiasm: because of substantial over-allocation of emissions allowances in the...

This paper deals with technical progress in the energy efficiency of US households' capital stock (appliances and passenger cars) and its potential for energy saving. An increase in the energy efficiency of households can only be achieved via a different capital stock. The link between the...

We study the evolution and cyclical dependency of the cross sectional distribution of firm level job creation rates from 1975 to 2004 for the Austrian private sector. We find that the share of firms that o not adjust has declined over time, but that the share of entries, exits, growing and...

Initially this paper outlines the concept of a tax on all transactions to do with financial assets. It summarises the main arguments for and against such a tax. The next part documents the relevant empirical evidence necessary to be able to evaluate the arguments. In particular the development...

The deepening of the recent crisis was driven by the simultaneous devaluation of stock wealth, housing wealth and commodity wealth. The potential for this devaluation process had been "built up" during the boom of stock prices, house prices and commodity prices between 2003 and 2007. Hence, this...

This paper analyses the effect of individual risk aversion and time preference on cross-border commuting and migration intentions. Both the theoretical and empirical results show that the probability of being willing to migrate decreases with risk aversion, the rate of time preference, and the...

Unemployed workers suffer from poor health conditions, a fact which is documented by a large number of studies covering objective health measures, satisfaction with health status and mortality. This paper contributes to the literature with an empirical analysis of sick leave micro-data from...