The retirement decisions of spouses may be interdependent for various reasons: similarity of tastes, joint assets, sharing rules for income and housework, or complementarity of leisure. Because of data limitations, only a few empirical studies exist on this topic. From a policy point of view...

This paper studies the effect of increased immigration in Austria on the risk to natives of becoming unemployed. Austria experienced a dramatic rise in the share of alien workers as a result of the breakdown of the former communist regimes (especially that of the former Yugoslavia). We...

We study Austrian job reallocation in the period of 1978–98, using a large administrative dataset where we correct for ‘spurious’ entries and exits of firms. We find that on average nine out of 100 randomly selected jobs were created within the last year, and that about nine out of...

One of the most controversial aspects of immigration policy is the impact of foreigners on labour market outcomes of natives. Simple labour supply analysis demonstrates that these effects depend upon whether immigrants and natives act as substitutes or complements. In the first part of the study...

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...

Personnel economics has suggested conflicting arguments about the impact of increased wage dispersion within firms on workers’ productivity and firm performance. Besides giving more advancement incentives, bigger wage differentials might also give rise to less cooperation and more politics...

Recent years have seen a major structural break in trade relations between West European countries and the former Eastern bloc. Austria experienced a disproportionately large bilateral trade creation with these countries. In this paper we take a closer look at the impact this trade growth has...

In this paper we look at the effects of immigration and trade with Eastern Europe on unemployment in Austria. Using individual data over the period 1989-92 of male blue-collar workers employed in the Austrian manufacturing sector, we decompose possible detrimental impacts in unemployment entry...

This paper studies how an increase in the minimum retirement age affects the labor market behavior of older workers. Between 2000 and 2006 the Austrian government gradually increased the early retirement age from 60 to 62.2 for men and from 55 to 57.2 for women. Using administrative data on the...

We study a model of endogenous growth where firms invest both in product and process innovations. Product innovations (that open up completely new product lines) satisfy the advanced wants of the rich. Subsequent process innovations (that decrease costs per unit of quality) transform the...