Stringent fiscal rules and budgetary procedures might generate incentives for political decision-makers to cut predominantly productive public investment during periods of fiscal consolidation. While the influence of the European Stability and Growth Pact on public investment received a lot of...

The financial crisis has brought about an economic recession which is more severe and widespread than any decline in production in the past 50 years. In the USA and Europe the decline in production over the entire economy was, however, much less than during the Great Depression of the 1930s....

Proposing a novel research design for firm-level impact studies, I investigate the effects of venture capital financing on corporate performance by applying a two-stage propensity score matching on Austrian micro-data. Controlling for differences in industry, location, legal status, size, age,...

This paper compares the depth and length of the recent crisis with the Great Depression in the 1930s. It claims that economic policy played a crucial role in shortening and curtailing the recent crisis. We analyse which policies were applied during the recent crisis and which measures worked. We...

When dealing with credit booms driven by capital inflows, monetary authorities in emerging markets are often reluctant to raise interest rates, as they fear that an increase attracts even more capital and appreciates the currency. A number of countries therefore use reserve requirements as an...

The European Union is a successful integration experiment, with an increasing number of member countries and an unexpected depth of integration. According to many indicators, it is the largest economic region in the world, leading in many "beyond GDP" indicators representing well being including...

This paper analyses the impact of corporate taxation on a firm's debt policy. We contribute to the existing literature in two ways: 1. we incorporate firm heterogeneity with respect to firm size and legal form, 2. we explicitly model persistence in the debt-to-asset ratio. Econometrically this...

This paper compares the forecasting performance of three different econometric models for the Eurozone and the USA: a vector auto regression (VAR), a Bayesian vector auto regression (BVAR), and a structural vector error correction model (SVEC). The forecast evaluation is based on 19 vintages of...

The paper studies the persistence of the high-growth phenomenon in Austria using social security data for the years 1985 to 2007. The Eurostat-OECD definition is used to identify high-growth firms and a modified Birch Index to identify high-impact firms. Bringing the definitions to the data...

Sick workers in many countries receive sick pay during their illness-related absences from the workplace. In several countries, the social security system insures firms against their workers' sickness absences. However, this insurance may create moral hazard problems for firms, leading to the...