In the EU, most large firms use e-business applications, such as enterprise resource planning and online procurement. Based on e-business watch data for EU-4 (Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom) we find that the actual use of enterprise resource planning and online procurement is...

This paper uses a data set covering 9 EU15 member states and 7 candidate countries and new member states to compare inter-regional migration patterns in the 1990s. We find that migration is lower in candidate countries and new member states than in EU15 member states. Also in contrast to the...

We test whether intellectual property rights foster or hinder innovation by estimating IV structural equations for a large sample of Swiss firms. We find that better appropriability conditions at the industry level raise the number of competitors. However, conditional on the given industry...

This paper examines whether PageRank algorithms are a valid instrument for the analysis of technical progress in specific technological fields by means of patent citation data. It provides evidence for patent data in biotechnology. Recent literature has been critical with regard to the use of...

In this paper we deal with the measurement of technical efficiency (or X-efficiency) of institutions whose operations might be significantly affected by macroeconomic, environmental and non-controllable factors. For this purpose we introduce a four-stage DEA methodology based on the approach...

The great majority of Austrian banks operate on a regional or local basis and only a few banks provide their services on a national or even international scale. Obviously, the market environments regional or local banks face are different from that of nationwide operating banks. Casual evidence...

In this paper we investigate the performance of the Austrian banks which have, either actively or passively, participated in a domestic intra-banking merger or acquisition operation since 1995. For this purpose we apply the DEA methodology in combination with a Tobit regression approach to...