In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden die unternehmensstrategischen Rahmenbedingungen für die Entwicklung kleiner und mittlerer Buchverlage in Österreich untersucht. Als bestimmende Faktoren für deren wirtschaftliche Existenz sind u. a. die große Zahl von Klein- und Mittelverlagen, die zusammen nur einen sehr geringen Anteil am Buchangebot hervorbringen, die enge Verflechtung mit dem gesamten deutschsprachigen Markt und mit großen deutschen Verlagsunternehmen sowie Spezifika der Regulierungs- und Förderungspolitik (Buchpreisbindung, Literaturförderung) zu erachten. Unter diesen Rahmenbedingungen weist eine typische erfolgreiche österreichische SchriftstellerInnenkarriere folgende Stationen auf: Entdeckung durch einen österreichischen Kleinverlag und Wechsel zu einem zahlungskräftigen deutschen Großverlag, sobald der Name für hohe Verkaufszahlen steht. Ausgehend von diesen Gegebenheiten wird in der Arbeit eine Strukturanalyse der österreichischen Verlagsbranche nach Porter durchgeführt. Die Untersuchung basiert auf der vorhandenen Literatur- und Datenbasis sowie auf mehreren ExpertInneninterviews. Als Ergebnis kann festgehalten werden, dass unter den gegeben Rahmenbedingungen für unternehmerisch initiative Klein- und Mittelverlage in Österreich durchaus Überlebensmöglichkeiten bestehen, sofern sie adäquate Marktnischen finden und auch die neuen technischen Möglichkeiten (Digitalisierung) ausschöpfen; gegebenenfalls wird eine unternehmerische Eingliederung in größere, kapitalstarke deutsche Verlagsgruppen bei Beibehaltung der regional basierten Qualitäten die realistischste Entwicklungsstrategie sein. (Autorenref.) / Series: Schriftenreihe / Forschungsbereich Wirtschaft und Kultur

This paper contrasts the dynamical behaviors of fixed and flexible price regimes for a monopolistically competitive manufacturing sector in which firms base decisions on expectations about product demands. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

After a review of the theoretical justifications of the fiscal criteria and the different concepts of sustainability the fiscal position of the EU countries selected as members of the EMU is examined. Firstly, the assessment by the Commission and the EMI is critically reported. After identifying countries with successful consolidations and those without success conclusions about the implications for sustainability are drawn. It turns out that the effort towards fiscal consolidation is not yet over for a long time. Here, the Stability and Growth Pact draws the line. In particular in countries with presently very high debt to GDP ratios the next decade in the EMU could become a hard one. Secondly, macromodel simulations shall demonstrate how asymmetric shocks (one supply and one demand shock) may hamper the ambitions towards sustainability. Similarly, a single monetary policy can have detrimental effects when the business cycles are not synchronized in Euroland. This problem is touched upon with model simulations of a change of the common interest rate. (author's abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

We use a three-country, 14-sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to examine the effect of immigration on the labor market, production sectors and the macroeconomy of Austria and Hungary. We analyze the phenomenon of immigration in an empirical model in order to get an idea of the quantitative dimension of the economic problems involved, rather than introduce new integration theory. Our study aims more at the impact of migration than at forecasting future migration flows. (excerpt) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

We address empirically the factors affecting the dynamics of income inequality among industrialized economies. Using a panel for 32 developed countries spanning the last four decades, our results indicate that the predictions of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem concerning the effects of international trade on income inequality find support in the data if we concentrate on imports from developing countries as a trade measure, as theory would imply. We find that democratization, the interaction of technology and education and changes in the relative power of labour unions affect inequality dynamics robustly.

The recent transformation of European electricity markets with increasing generation from intermittent renewables brings about many challenges. Among them, decaying wholesale prices, partly due to support schemes for renewables, may send insufficient investment signals for other technologies. We investigate the investment decision in a structural equation based on the Tobin's q-model, which we extend by both industry- and firm-technology-specific uncertainty. We utilize rich and novel data at the disaggregated firm generation technology level of European electricity generating firms for the period 2006-2014. Our results show that investment in any generation technology follows market incentives despite sunk and irreversible capital, confirming the implications of the q-model. Moreover, while firm-technology-specific uncertainty decreases firms' investment activity, especially in coal and gas, aggregate uncertainty triggers firms' investment. Our results raise concerns about system reliability in the long run since conventional technologies still serve as a flexible system back-up. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the out-of-sample predictive accuracy of different global vector autoregressive (GVAR) specifications based on alternative weighting schemes to address global spillovers across countries. In addition to weights based on bilateral trade, we entertain schemes based on different financial variables and geodesic distance. Our results indicate that models based on trade weights, which are standard in the literature, are systematically outperformed in terms of predictive accuracy by other specifications. We find that, while information on financial linkages helps improve the forecasting accuracy of GVAR models, averaging predictions by means of simple predictive likelihood weighting does not appear to systematically lead to lower forecast errors.

Supranational institutions face an important trade-off when hiring personnel. On the one hand, hiring decisions are based, as in most organizations, on a candidate's professional qualifications. On the other hand, supranational institutions often aim for broad national representation. Reviewing evidence from the European Central Bank, we show that nationality is indeed relevant for both hiring and decision-making. Specifically, we find a disproportionately narrow spread of national representation in the top management of the ECB. Further, there is evidence for the existence of national networks between adjacent management layers. Finally, monetary policy decisions seem to be linked to national representation in the core business areas of the ECB. Examining a sample of 27 European countries over the period from 1999 to 2008, we estimate Taylor rules for alternative sets of euro area aggregates derived from different weighting schemes of national macroeconomic data. Our results indicate that weights based on national representation in the mid-level management of the ECB's core business areas best describe the central bank's interest-rate setting behavior.

We use satellite data on forest cover along national borders in order to study the determinants of deforestation differences across countries. We combine the forest cover information with data on homogeneous response units, which allow us to control for cross-country geoclimatic differences when assessing the drivers of deforestation. Income per capita appears to be the most robust determinant of differences in cross-border forest cover and our results present evidence of the existence of decreasing effects of income on forest cover as economic development progresses.(authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Migrants into European countries are often less educated than European natives. We analyse whether migrants' children are more or less likely than natives' children to achieve upward educational mobility across generations, and study differences in the factors, which contribute to differences in mobility for the two groups. We find that migrants' descendants are more often upwardly mobile (and less often downwardly mobile) than their native peers in the majority of countries studied, and show that the main factor contributing to these patterns is the education level of parents. Although a lower parental education means that their children are less likely to access the same amount of human, social and financial capital as children of more highly educated parents, migrants' descendants over the last two generations were able to make significant progress in reducing education gaps with natives.