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...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. This option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

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...

The theory suggests that investment activities and monetary policy influence the development of the global business cycle. The oil price and other raw material prices also play a key role in the economic development and there is a co-movement among oil consumption and global output. Therefore,...

Recent years have seen a growing literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) that resorts in a large part to cointegration techniques. The EKC literature has failed to acknowledge that such regressions involve unit root nonstationary regressors and their integer powers (e.g. GDP and GDP...

Two very different approaches are used to explore the relation between market orientation and gender wage differentials in international data. More market orientation might be related to gender wage gaps via its effects on competition in product and labor markets and the general absence of...