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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Die Evaluation des FIW erstreckte sich insgesamt über ein Jahr und umfasste dabei verschiedene Methoden. Ausgehend von einer deskriptiven Darstellung bzw. Erhebung der Leistungen des FIW (Veranstaltungen, Publikationen) wurden darauf aufbauend weitere Verfahren angewendet, wie etwa ein...

This study analyzes trends and investigates the relationship between external debt and economic growth in the WAMZ using descriptive trend analysis and panel data analysis. The trend and descriptive analysis assessed the behavior of external debt and economic growth while the empirical analyses...

In den 1990er-Jahren galt Deutschland als der „kranke Mann Europas“. Wachstumsschwäche und hohe Arbeitslosigkeit waren die Kennzeichen. Dieses Bild hat sich seit Mitte der 2000er-Jahre dramatisch verändert: Die deutsche Wirtschaft hat ihre Wachstumskrise hinter sich gelassen und wird von...