During the 90s the increase in health spending which compared to the overall growth had taken place at a rather rapid pace experienced a worldwide slow-down. In relation to overall economic growth and the expansion of other countries' health care systems, Austria's system grew below average- a...

This paper evaluates the impact of economic and legal variables on wage differentials between men and women. Since Becker (1957) economists have argued that competitive markets eliminate discrimination in the long run. On the other hand, practically all countries have enacted some sort of law...

This paper proposes a strategy to increase the efficiency of forecast combination. Given the availability of a wide range of forecasts for the same variable of interest, our goal is to apply combining methods to a restricted set of models. To this aim, a hierarchical procedure based on an...

Knowledge flows within and across countries should be carriers of important learning spillovers. We use data on 1.5 million patents and 4.5 million citations to analyze knowledge flows across 147 subnational regions. We estimate that only 15% of average knowledge is learned outside the average...

Worker remittances constitute an increasingly important mechanism for the transfer of resources from developed to developing countries, and remittances are the second-largest source, behind foreign direct investment, of external funding for developing countries. Yet, literature on worker...

Recent research suggests that the power law is one of the most universal laws in nature and it also seems to work quite fine in economics and finance. In this paper we show that the power law explains extremely well the relationship between the value of broad-based market indices and their...

Child labour has always been one of the core concerns of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). In this paper, we investigate whether ILO conventions have contributed to reducing the scale of the problem. We use two approaches to answering the question. Evidence based on country-level data...

Educational opportunities determine the intergenerational mobility of human capital and are affected by institutional features of schooling systems. The aim of this paper is twofold. It intends to show how strongly student performance depends on student background at two important stages in a...

Zahlreiche Studien weisen auf hohe Misserfolgsquoten von Unternehmenszusammenschlüssen hin, messen dies jedoch vor allem anhand finanzieller Indikatoren, während eine mitarbeiterbezogene Betrachtung unterbleibt. Kritisch wird die Situation, wenn hochqualifizierte, aber unzufriedene...