WIFO has been conducting its Business Cycle Survey since 1954. Today, some 1,600 businesses, with altogether more than 200,000 employees, are participating in the survey. The findings of the survey are analysed to obtain leading indicators of the state of the Austrian economy. The analysis shows...

This book takes up the challenge of developing an empirically based foundation for evolutionary economics built upon complex system theory. The authors argue that modern evolutionary economics is at a crossroads. At a theoretical level, modern evolutionary economics is moving away from the...

This book takes up the challenge of developing an empirically based foundation for evolutionary economics built upon complex system theory. The authors argue that modern evolutionary economics is at a crossroads. At a theoretical level, modern evolutionary economics is moving away from the...

We analyze sector specific shocks in productivity and demand in 19 manufacturing sectors of the Austrian economy. Based on a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model with long run restrictions developed by Gali's (1999) we extract technology and non-technology shocks from sectoral...

In this paper we explore the process of adoption and enforcement of a number of new information processing technologies, such as the typewriter, calculators, tabulation gears and book-keeping machines, starting from the 1880s in the United States. We show that their innovation and diffusion was...

Technological search is often depicted to be random. This paper takes a different view and analyses how innovative recombinant search is triggered, how it is done and what initial conditions influence the final design of technological artefacts. We argue that complementarities...

The contribution of different-sized businesses to job creation continues to attract policymakers’ attention; however, it has recently been recognised that conclusions about size were confounded with the effect of age. We probe the role of size, controlling for age, by comparing the cohorts of...

Technological search is often depicted to be random. This paper takes a different view and analyses how innovative recombinant search is triggered, how it is done and what initial conditions influence the final design of technological artefacts. We argue that complementarities...

Hampered by the slow economy, sagging growth in workers' productivity caused a rise in unit labour costs in 2013 by some 2.1 percent over the previous year. Combined with an unfavourable exchange rate (+1.8 percent), this affected the unit labour cost position for Austrian goods producers...