The financial crisis has affected the real economy in stages yet nevertheless at an unexpected rate and with all regions being affected simultaneously. It advanced almost independently of the regions' exposure to the actual initial causes, among them the subprime crisis, innovative financial...

This paper studies a program that extends the maximum duration of unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to 209 weeks. Interestingly, this program is targeted to individuals aged 50 years or older, living in certain eligible regions in Austria. In the evaluation, I use sharp discontinuities in...

We use firm closure data from social security records for Austria 1978-1998 to investigate the effect of age on employment prospects. We rely on exact matching to compare workers displaced due to firm closure with similar non-displaced workers. We then use a difference-in-difference strategy to...

This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance – the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential duration of benefits (PBD) – affect the duration of unemployment. In 1989, the Austrian government made unemployment insurance more generous by changing,...

The paper assesses the economic impact of a toll imposed on heavy-goods vehicles proportional to distance driven. The macroeconomic impact of the toll is estimated by using the disaggregated econometric model MULTIMAC of the Austrian economy. The assumption is that all toll revenues will be...

There are marked differences in health conditions of the Austrian population by socioeconomic status, gender, age, education, occupation and income as well as by nationality. The low educational attainment of migrants, their concentration in particular occupations and industries and their...

There are considerable differences in the incidence of sickness, the pattern of diseases and the duration of episodes of sickness by age, gender, education and employment status. Employed have a significantly better health record than the unemployed. The question why this should be so is...