Worldwide populations are growing older. Thus, many countries fear economic and societal burden, but population aging can also be seen as an opportunity for a society. Which view prevails is very much dependent on the chosen measures of aging that are so far mainly based on chronological age. In the first part of this thesis measures of population aging are analyzed and new measures are proposed. The novel cognition adjusted dependency ratio (CADR) is introduced as an alternative to the old-age dependency ratio (OADR), which only considers a chronological age threshold. A CADR based ranking of certain countries across the world shows a completely different picture compared to an OADR based ranking of the same countries. Northern European countries and the United States are listed at the top according to their CADR, while they are at the bottom end considering their OADR. This difference is discussed in detail within this thesis. On the micro level, a characteristics based approach is proposed to measure and compare individual aging. More specifically, differences in aging are converted into single years of age, which highlights the magnitude of differences between groups such as socioeconomic subpopulations. The second part of this thesis addresses the huge variability in cognitive functioning, a dimension of healthy aging, between and within countries. The relationship between cognition and education (e.g. individual and national level) is investigated across countries that vary substantially in terms of their demography and level of economic and social development. The results indicate that increasing the national educational level is assigned with better individual cognitive performance in addition to the positive individual education effect. In the subsequent study, determinants associated with the differences in cognitive functioning across countries, cohorts, and gender are examined. Improvements in living conditions and education support better cognitive performance. Moreover, better living conditions and higher education will increase gender differences in some cognitive functions and decrease or eliminate the gender differences in other cognitive abilities. (author's abstract)

Series: SRE - Discussion Papers

Series: Creative Industries in Vienna: Development, Dynamics and Potentials

From its very beginnings, regional science has been open to intellectual exchange with many other scientific disciplines. This has led to cross-fertilization, but also to problems concerning the intellectual identity of regional science. After half a century of history of the field, it is time to ask the question, whether or not regional science has developed into a scientific discipline in these decades. In this paper we use cross-citation data between 464 journals in different disciplines to answer this question. With this data set we attempt to find out, how strongly regional science journals are interconnected by citations as compared to their citation links to journals in neighbouring disciplines. We find that when we consider the raw citation data, regional science becomes fragmented with its journals tied to those from economics, geography, planning, etc. When we standardize the citation information to take into account size differences between journals, however, regional science appears to form a strong and well connected dscientific discipline. / Series: SRE - Discussion Papers

This paper reviews and summarizes the literature that has concentrated on budget consolidations and their fiscal and economic effects. The issue of fiscal adjustments has again gained importance due to the recent economic crisis and the resulting fiscal imbalances. The existing literature shows that there may be some factors that influence the fiscal and economic impact depending on the methods used and the underlying assumptions. Referring to the fiscal impact of consolidations, this paper concludes that the composition of the adjustment is the most influential factor in reducing public deficits and debt. This result is in line with other recent literature surveys. Other factors mentioned in the underlying studies include the specialization in certain expenditure areas like public administration and social security, the size of the adjustment, the initial state of public finances and the economy before consolidation, fiscal rules, political and monetary institutions. In contrast to the fiscal effects, the results of the studies concentrating on economic effects vary substantially. Since the early 90's there has been a lively debate about the possibility of non-Keynesian effects after consolidations. Despite the fact that there is no consensus about possible expansive effects of consolidations, this paper concludes that a substantial share of the previous work finds that large negative effects do not necessarily have to prevail. Whether these reversed effects are strong enough to turn restrictive effects into expansive ones depends on different factors, which are similar to those mentioned before in the fiscal effects context. (author's abstract)

ERP systems support companies in their day-to-day business. They support all relevant business processes, they record transaction data and relate them to planning data, which help managers to control their companies effectively. Each ERP vendor develops the system based on theory and experience in order to support the processes of many types of companies. Vendors try to achieve a balance between standardisation and flexibility to allow companies a fast customization of the ERP system. Very small components allow the system a high degree of flexibility, but they increase the effort required for the administration and coordination between the components. If companies use components from different vendors, an ERP project becomes more complicated. This dissertation introduces a framework for the design of an ERP system based on small components. The framework focuses on the interfaces between functions and the functional areas (organisational units) of the company. (author's abstract)

In model-driven development (MDD), domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) are used as tailor-made software languages targeting dedicated application domains. Due to the narrow domain coverage of DSMLs, demands to integrate their individual functionality into a consolidated DSML arise (e.g., developing a software product combining two or more pre-existing DSMLs). However, in order to realize the benefits of integrated DSMLs, it must be ensured that the integrated DSML is correctly implemented and behaves as specified. To support the integration and the test of DSMLs, this thesis presents an approach targeting the Meta Object Facility (MOF) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML)- a metamodeling infrastructure frequently employed for the MDD of software systems. The integration of DSMLs is based on a rewriting technique for model-to-text (M2T) transformations. This method allows for the reuse as well as for the automatic refactoring of M2T transformation templates to fix important syntactical mismatches between templates and the integrated DSML. To test an integrated DSML, scenarios are used to define domain requirements on an abstract level (via structured text descriptions). In a subsequent step, executable scenario tests are derived from the requirements-level scenarios. These executable scenario specifications are then employed to test the integrated DSML for compliance with corresponding domain requirements. Empirical evaluations of the approach (case studies, controlled experiment) demonstrate its successful application, collect evidence for its usefulness, and quantify its benefits. The integrated proof-of-concept implementations build on the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), making use of and extending well-known Eclipse-based projects. All accompanying developments are placed into the public domain as free/libre open source software. Within the framework of this thesis, research results were originally published as individual contributions (workshop, conference, and journal articles). All research contributions are results of applying a design science research approach. (author's abstract)

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