Income comparisons are among the key mechanisms used to explain satisfaction and happiness, among other outcomes. Yet progress on the questions of who people use as social referents and whether differential selection patterns exist can only be made based on valid and reliable measures of pay...

Social comparisons are an essential source of information about the self. Research in social psychology has shown individual variation in the tendency toward comparison with other people's opinions and abilities, raising the question of whether social comparisons are driven by psychological...

Florian Dorn prepared this study during his doctoral studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich (LMU). The study was completed in September 2020 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics. This dissertation contributes to the empirics of public economics and...

Equality of opportunity is a principle of justice that is built on two fundamental ideas. On the one hand, outcome differences across individuals are unacceptable if they are rooted in factors that are beyond individual control. Examples of such circumstance characteristics are the biological...

The spatial concentration of production and population to urban areas is an important theme in societal discussion. The spatial concentration of economic activity is called agglomeration in urban economics. The economic impact of agglomeration is seen in the productivity of firms. Understanding...

This Policy Note reports on the analyses undertaken in a number of wiiw Working Papers that are the output of two projects financed by the Anniversary Fund of the Austrian National Bank (Project no. 18474 and no. 17166). Four of the papers are based on survey data from the FIMAS dataset, which...

This study was prepared by Sven Neelsen while he was working with the ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in December 2011 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in May 2012. The study investigates long-run effects of...

Die Weltwirtschaft ist 2009 zum ersten Mal seit Mitte des vorigen Jahrhunderts nicht gewachsen. Die Wirtschaftsleistung dürfte um 2% zurückgegangen sein, in den Industrieländern um 3,5%. Dies war die Folge der Finanzkrise, sie hat zu einem Einbruch des Welthandels mit Folgen auf alle...

This Policy Brief discusses the growth prospects of the Central and Eastern European (CEEC) region following the current economic crisis. It argues that the 'integration model of growth' of the CEEC region was characterised by a very high degree of external liberalisation. In one group of...

Given the recent economic problems of southern EU countries that are rooted in lacking competitiveness, this task will summarise existing knowledge on the factors impeding on or facilitating the economic development of peripheral/low income regions in the EU, and discuss policy options to...