The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was fundamentally reformed in 2003. From 2005 on, farmers will receive decoupled income support payments instead of production premiums if basic standards for environment, food safety, animal health and welfare are met. Farmers will likely adjust production...

Regional development in Austria has long been characterized by an east-south-west divide with eastern and southern states trailing western states in terms of value added and employment growth. In the 1990's, however, growth in value added was higher in the south and east and in terms of...

In this paper we investigate the performance of the Austrian banks which have, either actively or passively, participated in a domestic intra-banking merger or acquisition operation since 1995. For this purpose we apply the DEA methodology in combination with a Tobit regression approach to...

This paper discusses conceptual frameworks for measuring the effects of innovation policy and begins with applying conventional descriptive methods to explore how firms rate and rank the merits of public intervention. Based on survey data from some 1200 Austrian firms we then challenge the...

A challenge facing countries with an ageing population is how to retain a larger proportion of older workers in the work force while at the same time maintaining productivity growth - the latter being a necessary condition for economic sustainability of globalised economies. Apart from...

The paper investigates the determinants of banking profitability and banking market conditions in Austria. We conduct a panel econometric analysis which allows for testing the hypotheses which have become the most prominent in the literature on bank profitability: the...

Since the 1960s, several countries have adopted incomes policies to control inflation that was interpreted as the result of a distributional struggle between business and labour unions. This theoretical framework, termed the "battle of the mark-ups", has also formed the basis for estimating...