Endowment with infrastructure, human and cultural capital is highly significant for regional economic performance. After clustering the regions, this hypothesis is tested for Austrian, German and Swiss NUTS 3 regions by applying a quantile regression analysis. First results confirm the...

This paper studies the impact of sales uncertainty on firms' investment outlays using the database of the Deutsche Bundesbank's corporate balance sheet statistics. The sample used for estimation is a panel of 4'234 west German manufacturing firms with 33'217 observations, covering the years...

This article explores the measurement of the production technology and efficiency of the performing arts sector. The stochastic frontier analysis has been used to estimate the technical efficiency scores for 20 Austrian and 30 Swiss non-profit theatres over 36 and 26 years, respectively. The...

Repurchase agreements (repos) are secured money market transactions. The cash taker provides collateral in the form of securities and in return receives money from the cash provider. To ensure the continuous covering of the cash amount, the definition of eligible collateral, its handling and...

This paper analyzes the impact of contract-related risk factors on inward foreign direct investment. We presume that risk related determinants enter directly the cost function of multinationals. For a sample of 50 developed and less developed countries and the time period 1985-1997 we find a...

This paper explores the effects of insurance parameters and complementary information environment on the patient's primary prevention activity. The theoretical model is based on a principal-agent setting in which the patient acts as an agent in deciding about his prevention efforts. The insurer...

This paper investigates the technical efficiency differences of a sample of regional employment offices (REOs) across Swiss cantons. Regular job-search assistance, registration and matching of unemployed workers with job vacancies performed by employment offices are all important active labour...

This paper examines the causality between the Swiss federal governments revenue and expenditure over the 1900 to 2002 period by estimating the short- and longrun relation within an error-correction approach that places more emphasis on the long-run relation as a source of the causal link. The...

Nordhaus (2008) has developed a testing strategy for what he calls "Baumol's diseases", by which name he designates a number of by-products of structural change that are unwanted from an economic policy perspective. He finds that the U.S. economy is strongly affected by the "diseases". This...

A New Keynesian DSGE model with non-Ricardian households is estimated and tested for the Portuguese economy The share of non-Ricardian households is estimated to be 58%. This relatively high value conforms to estimates for the US economy (50%), but is higher than for other European countries...