Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct...

Policy debates about the balance of vocational and general education programs focus on the school-to-work transition. But with rapid technological change, gains in youth employment from vocational education may be offset by less adaptability and thus diminished employment later in life. To test...

Income distribution as it currently is and its long-term development are studied from a variety of data sources. In terms of workers, the study focuses on the wages and salaries of the dependently employed. It finds that the gap between low- and high-wage earners is broad and has further widened...

In this paper I analyse the export behaviour of firms located in different Central European countries (Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) with respect to migration. Ever since the seminal article by Gould (1994) on immigrant links to their home country and due to empirical research...

A small number of firms have a large market share in the Austrian food retailing market. Market concentration has been growing over the last years which has raised concerns about market power. Previous studies on price setting behaviour in the food retailing market were at the national level and...

This paper highlights the importance of "centrality" for pricing. Firms characterised by a more central position in a spatial network are more powerful in terms of having a stronger impact on their competitors' prices and on equilibrium prices. These propositions are derived from a simple...

This paper investigates the influence of competition on price and product quality among Austrian camping sites, a market charactised by both horizontal (spatial) and vertical product differentiation. Theoretically, the effect of competition on quality is ambiguous and depends on the degree of...