In a simple growth model we explore the current and future growth effects of the regional population structure. Regional GDP growth in 227 regions within six countries in central Europe is explored as how they depend on the young and old dependency ratio. The young dependency ratio (YDR) is...

The aim of this paper is to analyze and estimate salient characteristics of unemployment dynamics. Movements in unemployment are viewed as "chain reactions" of responses to labour market shocks, working their way through systems of interacting lagged adjustment processes. In the context of...

Labor force participation rates of mothers in Austria and Germany are similar, however full-time employment rates are much higher among Austrian mothers. In order to find out to what extent these differences can be attributed to differences in the tax transfer-system, we perform a comparative...

Motivated by economic-theory concepts - the Fisher hypothesis and the theory of the term structure - we consider a small set of simple bivariate closed-loop time-series models for the prediction of price inflation and of long- and short-term interest rates. The set includes vector...

We analyze the impact of large firms on business tax rates using data from German mu-nicipalities in Hesse in 1998-2005. Results suggest that business tax rates decrease with tax-payers' concentration, indicating strong local lobbying power of large firms.

This paper studies the voluntary provision of public goods that is partially driven by a desire to offset for individual polluting activities. We first extend existing theory and show that offsets allow a reduction in effective environmental pollution levels while not necessarily extending the...

The New Economic Geography predicts a positive effect of market access on wages, as represented by the wage equation. Several studies provide empirical evidence in favor of the wage equation. However, a key problem is the endogeneity of market access: it is challenging to identify the causal...

This paper investigates how inflation expectations evolve. In particular, we analyze the time-varying nature of the propensity to update expectations and its potential determinants. For this purpose we set up a flexible econometric model that tracks the formation of inflation expectations of...

More recently, there has been a renewed interest in cluster policies for supporting industrial and regional development. By virtue of the linkage between growth and innovation, R&D intensive industries play a crucial role in cluster development strategies. Empirical cluster research has to...