In this paper I analyse the export behaviour of firms located in different Central European countries (Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovakia) with respect to migration. Ever since the seminal article by Gould (1994) on immigrant links to their home country and due to empirical research...

A small number of firms have a large market share in the Austrian food retailing market. Market concentration has been growing over the last years which has raised concerns about market power. Previous studies on price setting behaviour in the food retailing market were at the national level and...

This paper highlights the importance of "centrality" for pricing. Firms characterised by a more central position in a spatial network are more powerful in terms of having a stronger impact on their competitors' prices and on equilibrium prices. These propositions are derived from a simple...

This paper investigates the influence of competition on price and product quality among Austrian camping sites, a market charactised by both horizontal (spatial) and vertical product differentiation. Theoretically, the effect of competition on quality is ambiguous and depends on the degree of...

We examine the relationship between information and price dispersion in the retail gasoline market. We first show that the clearinghouse models in the spirit of Stahl (1989) generate an inverted-U relationship between information and price dispersion. We construct a new measure of information...

We empirically investigate the importance of centrality (holding a central position in a spatial network) for strategic interaction in pricing for the Austrian retail gasoline market. Results from spatial autoregressive models suggest that the gasoline station located most closely to the market...

In this article we propose an innovative way of delineating geographical markets based on easily accessible data. We apply this concept for the day care industry and investigate providers' location choices relative to local market characteristics to evaluate the widespread presumption that local...

This article analyses the relationship between the size and the quality of ethnic enclaves on immigrants' labor market integration. Using exogenously defined grid cells to delineate neighborhoods, we find robust empirical evidence that the employment rate of the respective immigrant group in the...

We investigate the relationship between external quality evaluation via experts, firm reputation and product prices and extend the existing empirical literature in three dimensions. First, we empirically account for endogenous reputation effects. An increase in quality has an immediate positive...

Equal access to childcare services is a key concern of childcare policy. This article analyses social inequalities in the availability of such services. We explore how observed disparities are related to the socio-economic status of neighbourhoods and investigate how different provider types...