Allocating an advertising budget to international travel markets

Deciding on advertising appropriations is a common problem to all National Tourist Offices. The Austrian National Tourist Office now employs a decision support model allowing for inclusion of managerial judgments. In tourism, like elsewhere, application of standard optimization routines to marketing decision making is straight- forward, once the relationship linking market response to input has been modeled adequately. A tailor-made decision calculus procedure eliciting managerial judgments on the relative importance of the factors determining a receiving country's travel market share provides the weights otherwise inaccessible by objective parameter estimation. A tourism manager thus can evaluate countries as tourism generators and allocate an advertising budget accordingly.     

Rationierung von Gesundheitsleistungen — Verfassungsrechtliche Maßstäbe der Kontingentierung

The compulsory health insurance must totally cover the medical needs of the insured while using the standards of todays medical cognition. This charge is restricted by the principle of economic efficiency which is concerned with the premium payer and the economy and has indeed been restricted by rationing measures as well as by ?open measures“ like the indemnification board, the ?set price system“ and hidden charges while consulting / visiting a doctor. The hope for protection of the standards of performance lie within the constitutional law. However, this doesn’t regulate the status quo. The warrantees obliged by law are accepted, with reservations, because of the financial possibilities. At the same time the constitutional law may dismantle the services to a certain degree to govern and to set priorities. The criteria are: The reservation of the law, the constitutional rights of the insured and of the care providers as well as the national objectives. Others are the ensurement of adequate coverage by the state considering the health care sector, protection of confidence, the systems’ justice, and the consequences.     

Fictitious Play, Shapley Polygons, and the Replicator Equation

For many normal form games, the limiting behavior of fictitious play and the time-averaged replicator dynamics coincide. In particular, we show this for three examples, where this limit is not a Nash equilibrium, but a Shapley polygon. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C73.     

Financial Distress and Optimal Capital Structure Adjustments

We show that asymmetric information may prevent firms with pure discount bonds from renegotiating their capital structure prior to the maturity of the debt, although this would increase the value of the firm when its prospects are poor. This inefficiency can be reduced if the firm issues debt with a risky intermediate debt payment, such as a coupon or a sinking fund payment. We also demonstrate that bankruptcy institutions leading to deviations from absolute priority can improve the timing of recapitalizations by financially distressed firms. Finally, we show that, under certain conditions, the optimal capital structure adjustment during financial distress consists of a convertible debt-for-straight debt swap.     

Use of Statistics in the Monetary Policy of the Czech National Bank: The Case of a Country in Transition

In the presented text the authors judge the importance of statistics in the monetary policy of the Czech National Bank (CNB) over the course of the economic transformation process, with particular consideration of changing statistical needs and the possibilities and limits of statistical data exploitation in the monetary analyses. The importance of statistics lies on the level of collection and processing of statistical information and on the level of use of statistical methods to analyse data. Since the start of the 1990s the requirements for statistics were significantly influenced by monetary policy. In the period 1990–1997, monetary targeting was the primary influential factor. Since 1998, the monetary policy is influenced by inflation targeting. Statistical priorities switched from monetary data to economy and financial market data. Much progress has been made in the use of statistical methods for analysing data. Statistics available at present cover the CNB's standard monetary-policy requirements and are on par with those in developed countries. Its further development will reflect the standard changes taking place in the more advanced countries.     

Shifts of the beveridge curve and the matching technology

TraditionalU/V analysis so far has been based on the assumption that the matching technology is linear-homogeneous. Only if this assumption holds, shifts of the Beveridge curve can be regarded without more ado as an increase or decrease of structural and/or frictional unemployment. If, however, the matching technology exhibits increasing or decreasing returns to scale, shifts of the Beveridge curve, leaving a variation in the matching probability aside, may be due to an increase or decrease in the matching activity level. The empirical results using Austrian data suggest that slightly increasing returns to scale are present in the matching process, but these are not so high that the observed shifts in the steady-state Beveridge curve could be explained by this fact.

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Zusammenfassung Die traditionelle U/V-Analyse basiert auf der Annahme, daß die Job-Vermittlungstechnologie auf dem Arbeitsmarkt linear homogen ist. Denn nur in diesem Fall lassen sich Verschiebungen der Beveridge-Kurve eindeutig als Anstieg oder Verringerung der Struktur- bzw. Friktionsarbeitslosigkeit interpretieren. Weist hingegen die Vermittlungstechnologie steigende oder sinkende Skalenerträge auf, so können Verschiebungen der Kurve auch durch Veränderungen im Transaktionsniveau auf dem Arbeitsmarkt hervorgerufen werden. Die ökonometrischen Schätzungen der Matchingfunktion mit österreichischen Daten zeigen, daß diese leicht steigende Skalenerträge aufweist; die Skalenerträge sind freilich nicht so groß, daß durch sie die Außenverschiebung der österreichischen Beveridge-Kurve in den achtziger Jahren erklärt werden könnte.

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I am indebted for helpful comments to Wolfgang Franz, Klaus Neusser, Karl Pichelmann, Denis Snower, Herbert Walther, and three anonymous referees.     

Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Regulated Labor Market: The Case of Austria

We study Austrian job reallocation in the period of 1978 to 1998, using a large administrative dataset where we correct for spurious entries and exits of firms. We find that on average 9 out of 100 randomly selected jobs were created within the last year, and that about 9 out of randomly selected 100 jobs were destroyed within the next year. Hence, the magnitude of Austrian job flows seems to be comparable to other countries, similar to the well-known results of Davis et al. (1996) for the United States. Job reallocation appears to be driven primarily by idiosyncratic shocks. However, job creation increases significantly during cyclical upswings whereas job destruction rises in downturns. We also find substantial persistence of job creation and destruction. The pronounced pattern of job reallocation rates falling with firm size and age continues to hold when we use a set of controls. Finally, we show that – controlling for sector and firm size composition – Austrian job reallocation rates are only half the rates for the U.S. This result is not surprising given the impact of tighter regulation and labor law in Austria.     

Außenhandelsstruktur und Faktorintensität 1962/1977

Summary As a supplement to the findings presented in an article in volume 2/1978 of this journal byG. Fink andJ. Skolka some further results concerning the capital and labour intensity of Austria's trade are provided. These results are based on a more disaggregated input-output approach and on modified ways to measure direct capital and labour inputs and seem to strenghten the hypothesis that in 1964 the capital and labour intensity of Austria's foreign trade was more or less neutral.The same approach was used to investigate the effects of the changing composition of export and import bundles on the factor intensities for the period 1962/1977. Although the structure of both exports and imports changed remarkable over this period the total content of labour and capital remained rather stable and the evolution was almost paralell for exports and imports.