With seasonal adjustment one has to decide whether to seasonal adjust an aggregate like GDP directly or to sum up its seasonally adjusted components. This choice is usually driven by subjective motives or practical convenience. In the case of seasonal adjustment with chain-linked data one might...

We study differences in contributory and non-contributory welfare benefit receipt between immigrants and natives for 16 EU countries. In contrast to previous studies we analyse differences in benefit levels allowing for potentially different takeup rates between immigrants and natives and use...

The paper summarises at first the main arguments in favour and against a FTT and provides empirical evidence about the movements of the most important asset prices. It is shown that their long swings result from the accumulation of extremely short-term price runs over time. Therefore a (very)...

This note proposes the continuous treatment approach as a valuable alternative to propensity score matching for evaluating economic effects of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). This framework allows to consider the variation in treatment intensities explicitly, and it does not call for the...

We raise fundamental questions about macroeconomics relevant to escaping the financial and economic crisis and shifting to a sustainable economy. First, the feasibility of decoupling environmental pressure from aggregate income is considered. Decoupling as a single environmental strategy is...

Energy conservation is widely accepted as an important strategy to combat climate change. It can, nevertheless, stimulate new energy uses that partly offset the original savings. This is known as rebound. One particular rebound mechanism is re-spending of money savings associated with energy...

The Austrian population will continue to grow over the next decades. At the same time the number of working age people is predicted to decline until 2030. In how far this demographic change will translate into changes in the total number of people in the labour force (employed plus unemployed...

The economic policy of Roosevelt's New Deal stays in sharp contrast to the course followed by European policy since 2009. At first, Roosevelt focussed on fighting the desperate feelings of people and the generally pessimistic mood of the public, on strictly regulating the financial sector and on...

The struggle over the FTT has developed in three phases. In the first phase (2009 to 2011) the supporters of the tax went on the offensive, supported by the "shock effects" of the financial crisis. This phase ended with the (preliminary) "victory" in the form of the FTT proposal of the European...