infonet-economy

We study the response of regional employment and nominal wages to trade liberalization, exploiting the natural experiment provided by the opening of Central and Eastern European markets after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Using data for Austrian municipalities, we examine differential pre- and post-1990 wage and employment growth rates between regions bordering the formerly…

Trade liberalization is often believed to benefit urbanized regions more than rural regions. We explore the effects of trade liberalization on employment and wage growth of different sized towns within a country. A multi-region model of intranational adjustment predicts that small towns have more elastic labor-force responses to trade liberalization. We examine this predictions in…

Women with children tend to earn lower hourly wages than women without children - a shortfall known as the ‘motherhood wage gap'. While many studies provide evidence for this empirical fact and explore several hypotheses about its causes, the impact of motherhood on job dimensions other than wages has scarcely been investigated. In order to assess changes in women's jobs…

We investigate active labor market programs in Austria. We find only small effects, if any, for most of the programs. However, the programs may have unintended consequences for women. In particular for younger women, a key effect of the programs and one reason for the male-female effect differential that is observed in the literature is to reduce or postpone pregnancies and to…

This paper uses a sample of German commercial and residential property returns to estimate parameters for stable distribution functions. A quantile-based estimation methodology is used to examine distributions of income, capital growth, and total returns. There are controls for the effects of property characteristics and for possible differences between appraisal-based and…