Impact of environmental regulation on economic activity-Austria

Zusammenfassung Die Umweltbelastung und Maßnahmen zur Verbesserung der Situation sind ein zentrales Thema der öffentlichen Debatte und Politik. Die vorliegende Arbeit erweitert Ansätze aus der Input-Output-Analyse (im Rahmen eines allgemeinen Gleichgewichtsmodelles) um Umweltbilanzen und Entsorgungskosten. Dies ist ein Ansatz, die wirtschaftlichen Auswirkungen der aktuellen umweltpolitischen Zielvorstellungen in Österreich zu quantifizieren. Dabei zeigt sich, daß die Auswirkungen auf die gesamte Volkswirtschaft überraschend gering bleiben (selbst bei radikaler Schadstoffreduktion), aber sektoral unterschiedliche Belastungen zu erwarten sind. Dies könnte bereits bestehende Strukturprobleme verschärfen.

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I am grateful for the assistance of Florian Gollob; he complied the voluminous data. The cooperation with Roland Pumberger was essential in order to complete this task. I also like to thank Bernhard Böhm, Josef Christl, and Elisabeth Szirucsek for their support. The suggestions and comments of the editor and two anonymous referees were very helpful in revising an earlier draft of this paper. Of course, I am responsible for any remaining error.     

Changing of the guards: New coaches in Austria’s premier football league

Professional team sports provide an ideal real world experiment to explore the effect of top executive replacement due to the availability of excellent performance data. This paper investigates how replacing the coach affects the performance of football teams. Analyzing almost 2,000 matches of the Austrian premier football league by ordinal (probit) regression techniques we find that a new coach tends to enhance team performance in home matches but to weaken it in away matches. However, neither of these effects turns out to be statistically significant. Nevertheless, the much discussed coach effect—ousting an underperforming coach in order to improve team performance at least temporarily—may make sense despite the costs involved by providing stronger ex-ante incentives for effort.

Model-Based Decision Support in Manufacturing and Service Networks

In this paper, we sketch some of the challenges that should be addressed in future research efforts for model-based decision support in manufacturing and service networks. This includes integration issues, taking into account the autonomy of the decision-making entities in face of information asymmetry, the modeling of preferences of the decision makers, efficiently determining robust solutions, i.e. solutions that are insensitive with respect to changes in the problem data, and a reduction of the time needed for model building and usage. The problem solution cycle includes problem analysis, the design of appropriate algorithms and their performance assessment. We are interested in a prototypical integration of the proposed methods within application systems, which can be followed up with field tests of the extended application systems. We argue that the described research agenda requires the interdisciplinary collaboration of business and information systems engineering researchers with colleagues from management science, computer science, and operations research. In addition, we present some exemplifying, illustrative examples of relevant research results.     

Universit?tsendowments – Eine Bestandsaufnahme der theoretischen und empirischen Forschung

While university endowments have a long history, their contribution to operating budgets has gained considerable significance in recent years. Further as an important class of institutional investor there is strong interest in behavior and performance from the academic research side. This paper surveys the literature in the emerging field of scientific research studies concerning university endowments. We classify papers into four areas. (1)?Organization, which pertains to governance structure and the investment policy statement; (2)?asset allocation, where we discuss the main theoretical framework and the relevant observations both across time and for type of endowment; (3)?performance, in which (risk-adjusted) performance is discussed and distinguished by type and size of endowment; (4)?spending, which discusses the relation to the classical views and theoretical literature as well as what university endowments do in practice. We find that the modern framework for theoretical and empirical analysis can provide a very useful perspective for understanding the role of endowments. Nonetheless we highlight several challenges that should form the basis for future research agendas.     

Unemployment and debt dynamics in a highly indebted small open economy

The paper analyzes the dynamic effects of a total factor productivity shock and an interest rate risk premium shock in a highly indebted open economy. In contrast to the standard open economy framework, search unemployment and wage bargaining are introduced. We find that a negative total factor productivity shock primarily has effects on the economy's production side and on welfare, but not on its stock of foreign debt and the country specific risk premium, and large part of the adjustment happens in the short-run. In contrast, a pure increase in the country specific risk premium causes substantial dynamics and a considerable reduction in foreign debt, allowing higher consumption in the long run and creating an intertemporal welfare gain, even though unemployment increases strongly in the short-run. A 50% haircut of foreign debt significantly reduces the initial response of the unemployment rate. In case of a temporary productivity shock, sticky wages imply smaller employment, but generate higher welfare than flexible wages.     

Permanent-transitory Decomposition in Var Models With Cointegration and Common Cycles

In this paper we derive permanent-transitory decompositions of non-stationary multiple times series generated by (r)nite order Gaussian VAR(p) models with both cointegration and serial correlation common features. We extend existing analyses to the two classes of reduced rank structures discussed in Hecq, Palm and Urbain (1998). Using the corresponding state space representation of cointegrated VAR models in vector error correction form we show how decomposition can be obtained even in the case where the number of common feature and cointegration vectors are not equal to the number of variables. As empirical analysis of US business fluctuations shows the practical relevance of the approach we propose.     

Regional Disparities in Transition Economies: A Typology for East Germany and Poland

This article uses cluster analysis to construct a typology of regions for East Germany and Poland on the basis of indicators for economic capability and their determinants. The results show that, in both countries, the most capable regions are those with or in the vicinity of the largest agglomerations. Besides high income, low unemployment and population gains from migration, these regions have comparatively large stocks of qualified labour and participate in technical progress. Two regional types in particular could be established as problematic: (1) rural regions peripheral to the agglomerations and (2) old industrialised regions. Indicators of investment are not very well suited to indicating the future economic capability of regions under the circumstances of transformation.     

Interpretable machine learning for real estate market analysis

Machine Learning (ML) excels at most predictive tasks but its complex nonparametric structure renders it less useful for inference and out-of sample predictions. This article aims to elucidate and enhance the analytical capabilities of ML in real estate through Interpretable ML (IML). Specifically, we compare a hedonic ML approach to a set of model-agnostic interpretation methods. Our results suggest that IML methods permit a peek into the black box of algorithmic decision making by showing the web of associative relationships between variables in greater resolution. In our empirical applications, we confirm that size and age are the most important rent drivers. Further analysis reveals that certain bundles of hedonic characteristics, such as large apartments in historic buildings with balconies located in affluent neighborhoods, attract higher rents than adding up the contributions of each hedonic characteristic. Building age is shown to exhibit a U-shaped pattern in that both the youngest and oldest buildings attract the highest rents. Besides revealing valuable distance decay functions for spatial variables, IML methods are also able to visualise how the strength and interactions of hedonic characteristics change over time, which investors could use to determine the types of assets that perform best at any given stage of the real estate investment cycle.