The expenditure-to-income ratio is a widely used measure of housing affordability as it is easy to calculate and to interpret. Yet it suffers from several flaws that may diminish its usefulness. This paper addresses the main points of critique and improves the accuracy of the ratio measure by...

Housing affordability problems are expected to increase for Austrian households because housing costs have been rising dynamically over the last years. Households who moved more recently are expected to be affected the most. Previous research has identified younger households as also being prone...

Die Einbeziehung von Humankapital zu Schätzung künftiger demographischer Entwicklungen gewinnt an Bedeutung, da bildungsspezifische Unterschiede in Fertilität, Mortalität und Migration die Entwicklung der Bevölkerung und somit wirtschaftliche Trends (etwa auf dem Wohnungsmarkt) wesentlich...

In this article I analyze the export behavior 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...

In this paper we analyse the role of ethnic networks in the location decision of migrants to the EU 15 at the regional level. Using a random parameters logit specification we find a substantially positive effect of ethnic networks on the location decision of migrants. The effect is, however,...

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...

We examine the relationship between information and price dispersion in the retail gasoline market. We first show that the clearinghouse models in the spirit of Stahl (1989) generate an inverted-U relationship between information and price dispersion. We construct a new measure of information...