Several empirical studies derive that personal positions with respect to policy measures are dominated by ideology instead of narrow self-interest. In the present field study we carried out a telephone survey with 1,003 respondents all over Austria. Instead of measuring selfishness indirectly by...

For nowcasting and short-term forecasting of industrial production and GDP, business surveys are a vital source of information. They cover information of the recent past as well as developments in the near future. Whereas variations in industrial production indices potentially cover weather...

I describe the extent and structure of cross-border commuting in the EU 27 to show that this is important only in a small number of border regions with strong linguistic, historic or institutional ties. Cross-border commuters are mostly medium skilled, male manufacturing workers, who have higher...

Socio-economic transformations associated with the shift to post-industrial societies have not only created new opportunities and prosperity, but have also given rise to the emergence of new social risks occurring at different stages of life. This paper examines the situation of children, who...

The growth performance of countries proved to be very different during the recent crisis. We apply principal component analysis to derive a single ordinal indicator on growth performance and to analyse whether initial conditions of economies or structural characteristics can explain the...

EU climate and energy policy defines ambitious objectives for the EU member countries requiring a fundamental change of energy systems. This paper suggests basing the analysis of restructuring options on energy services instead of energy flows. In order to provide the energy services in a...

The determinants of venture capital investment have attracted a significant amount of attention from both academics and policymakers. We use a version of the Keuschnigg-Nielsen model for venture-capital financed projects to condition our analysis on a reasonable set of exogenous variables but we...

This paper sets out a comprehensive framework to identify regional business cycles within Spain and analyses their stylised features and the degree of synchronisation among them and the Spanish economy. We show that the regional cycles are quite heterogeneous although they display some degree of...

Does the low wage sector serve as a stepping stone towards integration into better-paid jobs or at least towards integration of jobless people into employment? There is evidence for a "low-wage trap" and for a high risk of low-wage earners to get unemployed, but this may also be due to sorting...

This paper analyses the change in the Austrian business cycle over time using data back to 1954. The change in the cyclical pattern is captured using a nonlinear univariate structural time series model where the time of the break point is estimated. Results for GDP series suggest a break in the...