Are people happier if they experience freedom from regulation, and how do individual attitudes towards liberalisation influence personal life satisfaction? Based on data from European and World Values Surveys and the Economic Freedom of the World project we find evidence for positive effects of...

In recent years, a new trend of seasonal labour migration from Armenia to Russia has emerged. Based on a novel household survey, this paper analyses how successful seasonal migrants are in increasing their incomes. Applying matching operators allows addressing endogenous self-selection to...

This paper provides an economic assessment of export credit guarantee commitments by the Austrian export credit agency, using firm-level data on a cross-section of 178 Austrian exporting firms for the year 2008. In a first step, we estimate the relative importance of various determinants of...

This paper analyses the relationship between corporate taxation, firm age and debt. We adapt a standard model of capital structure choice under corporate taxation, focusing on the financing and investment decisions a firm is typically faced with. Our model suggests that the debt ratio is...

The aim of this paper is the econometric analysis of embodied and induced technological change that reduces energy input and CO2 emissions in production. For this purpose, a model of unit costs and factor demand for 35 industries in 23 EU countries has been set up, based on the World...

In this paper we present a new long-term database on monthly export and import series for 23 economies during 1921-2010 and its first empirical application. Using these data, we analyse the synchronised decline in foreign trade during the recession 2008-09 in a historical perspective. We...

Soon after the establishment of the Eurozone it became obvious that the structural differences between member countries would not abate, as expected, but rather gradually widen. Although part of the problem can be attributed to the enlargement process, it also relates to asymmetric effects of...

Since the 1960s, several countries have adopted incomes policies in various forms to control inflation that had been interpreted as the result of a distributional struggle between business and labour unions. Recent writings on the NAIRU, however, ignore past policy interventions in the wage and...

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...