On February 12, 2010, SUERF, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Bankwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft continued their established tradition of jointly organised conferences. As evidenced also by the 115 conference participants, this year's subject of "Contagion and Spillovers – New...

The Spanish economy is currently plagued by a deep recession with very high unemployment. We ask how much of the unemployment increase in Spain can be traced back to the debt deleveraging needs of Spanish households. We use provincial household debt and sectoral unemployment data and follow Mian...

Using a repeated cross-section of more than 258,000 residents of 39 European countries covering the period from 1990 to 2012, I study the impact of knowing different foreign languages on income and (for the first time) on unemployment. To help identify causal effects, I also employ a novel...

Small and medium-sized enterprises are a centrepiece of Europe's economy. Due to their limited size and their generally lower creditworthiness, their access to financial market instruments is more limited than for large enterprises, which benefit from more elaborate Treasury operations,...

In this paper I analyze the relationship between unemployment and criminal activity. Using a unique panel data set on German counties covering the years 2003 to 2009, I estimate the effect of unemployment on crime rates for different kind of offenses. I extensively control for potential...

This paper provides empirical evidence that Accelerated Vehicle Programs exhibit a positive influence on car registrations using unique aggregate monthly data for 23 OECD countries from 2000 to 2010. The effect is still traceable if dynamic panel data fixed effects methods are used to address...

This paper examines if overreaction of oil price forecasters is affected by uncertainty. Furthermore, it takes into account joint effects of uncertainty and oil price returns on forecast changes. The panel smooth transition regression model from Gonz alez et al. (2005) is applied with univariate...

Using data from social security records on Spanish males, we investigate the wage effects of working under a fixed-term contract. In a first step, we provide fixed-effects estimates of the wage effect of working under a fixed-term contract for low-skilled, medium-skilled, and high-skilled men...

This paper is among the first to link internal migration and subjective well-being in developed countries. Economic theory predicts that individuals migrate towards urban agglomerations, if the potential gain in income is sufficient to cover costs. However, this narrow view cannot explain why...

Large regional unemployment disparities are a common feature of the labor market in many countries. This study deals with the question whether regional unemployment disparities in western Germany widen, become narrower or remain constant over time. It examines the hypothesis of convergence for...