This paper investigates the consequences of pension reform for life-cycle unemployment and retirement. We find that (i) improving actuarial fairness in pension assessment not only boosts old age participation but also reduces unemployment among prime age workers and raises welfare; (ii)...

We study the environmental and economic effects of public abatement in the presence of multiple stable steady-state ecological equilibria. Under shallow-lake dynamics (SLD), the isocline for the stock of pollution features two stable branches, a good and a bad one. Assuming that the ecology is...

We investigate the impact of self-organized reputation versus certification by an independent institution on demand for online shops. Using data from a large Austrian price comparison site, we show that quality seals issued by a credible and independent institution increase demand more than...

The authors investigate the employment consequences of minimum wage regulation in 16 OECD countries, 1970-2008. Their treatment is motivated by Neumark and Wascher’s (2004) seminal cross-country study. Apart from the longer time interval examined, a major departure is the authors’ focus on...

We investigate the causal effect of market structure on market performance in the consumer electronics. We combine data from Austria’s largest online site for price comparisons with retail data on wholesale prices provided by a major hardware producer for consumer electronics. We observe input...

For many economic time-series variables that are observed regularly and frequently, for example weekly, the underlying activity is not distributed uniformly across the year. For the aim of predicting annual data, one may consider temporal aggregation into larger subannual units based on an...

This paper proposes a new model of market structure determination. It demonstrates that market structure need not be the result of ideology, political power, collusion among producers or the nature of the technology. In our setting, it is determined by bureaucrats who maximize their share of the...

While interest in social determinants of individual behavior has led to a rich theoretical literature and many efforts to measure these influences, a mature “social econometrics” has yet to emerge. This chapter provides a critical overview of the identification of social interactions. We...

A theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid "social humiliation." In a general equilibrium framework it is shown that as long as migration can reduce humiliation sufficiently, migration will occur even between two identical economies. Migration increases the...

This paper analyzes the role of uncertainty in a multi-sector housing model with financial frictions. We include time varying uncertainty (i.e. risk shocks) in the technology shocks that affect housing production. The analysis demonstrates that risk shocks to the housing production sector are a...