Provision of health care services in Austria

It is the aim of this paper to investigate three important variables of the health care system in Austria, that is the number of physicians working in the ambulatory sector, the number of medical services provided by the physicians and the related costs, by applying time series analysis to the quantities under consideration. The work analyzes stationarity, autocorrelation functions, presents unit root tests and calculates the Beveridge Nelson decomposition for an ARIMA(1,1,0)-model. The obtained findings are used to forecast future trends based on past values.The author is indebted to Ulrike Leopold, Klaus Neusser, Thomas Url and Peter Zweifel for many useful conversations and suggestions as well as to Keith Chester for English proofreading. The first version of the analysis presented was done as part of a project that was carried out at the Austrian Federal Institute of Public Health on behalf of the Austrian Government.     

Child Labor in Carpet Weaving: Impact of Social Labeling in India and Nepal

Does the labeling of tradable products like carpets which have been produced without child labor increase the welfare of children and their families? This paper presents results of surveys conducted in India and Nepal. The findings suggest a positive link between social labeling and the removal of child laborers for households above the subsistence level. However, for households below the subsistence level, no significant influence has been found.     

Das Management von Datenqualität

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Testing for altruism and social pressure in charitable giving

Every year, 90% of Americans give money to charities. Is such generosity necessarily welfare enhancing for the giver? We present a theoretical framework that distinguishes two types of motivation: individuals like to give, for example, due to altruism or warm glow, and individuals would rather not give but dislike saying no, for example, due to social pressure. We design a door-to-door fund-raiser in which some households are informed about the exact time of solicitation with a flyer on their doorknobs. Thus, they can seek or avoid the fund-raiser. We find that the flyer reduces the share of households opening the door by 9% to 25% and, if the flyer allows checking a Do Not Disturb box, reduces giving by 28% to 42%. The latter decrease is concentrated among donations smaller than $10. These findings suggest that social pressure is an important determinant of door-to-door giving. Combining data from this and a complementary field experiment, we structurally estimate the model. The estimated social pressure cost of saying no to a solicitor is $3.80 for an in-state charity and $1.40 for an out-of-state charity. Our welfare calculations suggest that our door-to-door fund-raising campaigns on average lower the utility of the potential donors.     

Diabetes: Alle zehn Sekunden stirbt ein Mensch

über die letzten Jahrzehnte hat sich Diabetes mellitus Typ 2 zu einer wahren Volkskrankheit entwickelt. Verschiedene medizinische, soziale, aber auch ?konomische Gegebenheiten der Erkrankung zwingen mehr denn je, früher therapeutisch einzugreifen und vor allem pr?ventiv einzugreifen.     

Klimaschutz im Verkehrssektor — aktuelle Beispiele aus der Verkehrsforschung

Decarbonising the transport sector will be one of the biggest challenges in the future. Current innovations in the transport sector will be used to identify greenhouse gas emission reduction methods and the associated costs. Economists from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have compiled current research results from various DLR institutes which have revealed that a wide range of technological and organisational innovations for reducing climate-related emissions are available with varying market maturity. Increasing technological efficiency alone, however, is not enough to achieve the ambitious climate targets. Good policies are also essential to take things to the next level.     

Role of social media in online travel information search

Social media are playing an increasingly important role as information sources for travelers. The goal of this study is to investigate the extent to which social media appear in search engine results in the context of travel-related searches. The study employed a research design that simulates a traveler's use of a search engine for travel planning by using a set of pre-defined keywords in combination with nine U.S. tourist destination names. The analysis of the search results showed that social media constitute a substantial part of the search results, indicating that search engines likely direct travelers to social media sites. This study confirms the growing importance of social media in the online tourism domain. It also provides evidence for challenges faced by traditional providers of travel-related information. Implications for tourism marketers in terms of online marketing strategies are discussed.