The educational and labor market returns to preschool attendance in Austria

Preschool attendance is widely recognized as a key ingredient for later socioeconomic success, mothers' labor market participation, and leveling the playing field for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is still relatively scarce, particularly in Europe. Using data from the 2011 Austrian European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we contribute to this literature by studying the effects of having attended preschool for the adult Austrian population. We find strong and positive effects of preschool attendance on later educational attainment, the probability of working full time, hourly wages, and the probability that the mother is in the labor market. Full time workers at the bottom and the top of the distribution benefit less than those in the middle. Women in particular benefit more in terms of years of schooling and the probability of working full time. Other disadvantaged groups (second generation migrants; people with less educated parents) also often benefit more in terms of education and work

Inheritance and equal opportunity – it is the family that matters

Inheritance fundamentally violates the meritocratic justice principle of society. Despite the high level of wealth concentration and the fact that few people would be affected, political support for an inheritance tax is rather low. The topic of inheritance is not only about wealth but about values. We combine both by using questions in the Austrian Household Finance and Consumption Survey tailored to examine family values. The main aim of the paper is to bring sociological concepts and perceptions into the economic analysis of the role of inheritance in wealth distribution. We find several inconsistencies in people’s perceptions concerning the relation of inheritance to issues of social justice. We argue that family values are decisive for negative perceptions of inheritance taxation. Our empirical evidence suggests that in order to understand the resistance to inheritance taxation in society better, family values have to be taken into account. The main aim of the paper is to deliver empirical evidence for bringing an interdisciplinary approach, including sociological concepts, into economic analysis when analysing the relationship between inheritance, wealth and taxation

Essays in economic survey analysis

Die vorliegende Arbeit besteht aus vier Kapiteln, die sich allesamt mit der ökonometrischen Analyse von Survey-Daten beschäftigen. Das erste Kapitel analysiert geschlechsspezifische Muster im intergenerationellen Transmissionsprozess von Bildung. Das zweite Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit dem Zusammenhang zwischen Finanzvermögen und Verbindlichkeiten privater Haushalte. Im dritten Kapitel wird die Rolle der Mikrodatenproduktion in Bezug auf die Analyse derselben untersucht und das vierte Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit den Effekten von Bildung auf das Einkommen in Österreich

Gender differences in risky asset behavior: the importance of self-confidence and financial literacy

Women are less likely than men to hold risky financial assets, a fact that has often been attributed to differences in risk aversion and, more recently, to differences in financial literacy and investor confidence. This paper studies the role of individuals’ confidence in their own financial literacy in explaining the gender gap in investment in risky assets, while controlling for actual financial literacy and a measure of risk aversion. It is the first paper to assess the role of confidence independent of actual financial knowledge for a large set of countries and it is the first to explore the role of confidence by using counterfactual decomposition techniques. Results from our analysis confirm recent findings of modern behavioral finance: confidence is a strong determinant of risky financial behavior and accounts for a large part of the gender gap.Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Serie

Building blocks for the macroeconomics and political economy of housing

Housing has played an essential part in the global financial crisis 2007-08 and the Euro crisis. Large parts of bank lending go to mortgages. Housing wealth is the largest part of wealth for most households and is, at the same time, more dispersed than other forms of wealth. House prices exhibit pronounced fluctuations that are closely linked to credit growth. Housing thus plays a crucial role in the macroeconomy, which has become even more pronounced under neoliberalism. We scrutinise different theoretical approaches to housing. Despite its theoretical shortcomings mainstream economics has pioneered empirical research on wealth effects in consumption and recently documented the role of house prices in financial cycles. Post-Keynesian theory emphasises endogenous money creation, cycles in asset prices and debt, and have formalised the notion of a debt-driven demand regime. Comparative Political Economy research has recently developed the concept of the varieties of residential capitalism, which has different structures of house ownership and housing finance at the core of political coalitions. Marxist political economy has long established the intrinsic link between ownership of land and economic rent and notes that homeownership can act as force of working class fragmentation. Wealth surveys can be used to trace the extent of conflicting interests in a class-relational approach

Home country effects of offshoring. A critical survey on empirical literature.

The International fragmentation of production processes is of rising importance. One part of this fragmentation involves the relocation of a production process from a home- to a new host country. This literature survey deals with the effects of such relocations on the home country. First of all, we try to conceptualize the terms and definitions most frequently used in this context which are "outsourcing", "offshore outsourcing" and "offshoring". Despite the fact that there is little textual documentation dealing directly with the phenomena of offshoring and offshore outsourcing we try to give an overview of possible empirical literature to which one can regard to. Including FDI literature we try to cover empirical literature which can provide helpful insight on the effects of a relocation to foreign countries on the home country in connection with wages, skill upgrading, prices, profits, taxes and unions. (author's abstract)Series: Discussion Papers SFB International Tax Coordinatio

How to use economic theory to improve estimators: Shrinking toward theoretical restrictions

We propose to use economic theories to construct shrinkage estimators that perform well when the theories' empirical implications are approximately correct, but perform no worse than unrestricted estimators when the theories' implications do not hold. We implement this construction in various settings, including labor demand and wage inequality, and estimation of consumer demand. We provide asymptotic and finite sample characterizations of the behavior of the proposed estimators. Our approach is an alternative to the use of theory as something to be tested or to be imposed on estimates. Our approach complements uses of theory for identification and extrapolation

Wealth Effects on Consumption in Austria

Between the start of the financial crisis in the third quarter of 2007 and the third quarter of 2008, Austrian household sector losses arising from investment in tradable securities amounted to approximately EUR 24 billion. This study uses micro and macro data to examine the possible consequences of this loss of wealth on the consumption behavior of households. Micro data for Austria indicate that owing to unequal distribution, it is primarily the wealthier households that have been directly affected by the crisis. However, all households may be impacted by the consequences of the financial crisis via confidence effects, irrespective of whether they hold securities or not. Estimates based on macro data show that the marginal propensity to consume out of wealth of Austrian households is 0.05 and thus within the international average. Results of Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB) simulations using a macroeconometric model indicate that a decrease in wealth has a relatively minor effect on private consumption and economic growth in Austria. Moreover, this effect only occurs with a substantial lag. Due to the historic singularity of the current financial crisis, however, above all the indirect confidence effects could be more intense than estimated.wealth effects, financial wealth, marginal propensity to consume out of wealth, saving behavior, financial crisis

Replication data for: "How to Use Economic Theory to Improve Estimators: Shrinking Toward Theoretical Restrictions"

Replication data for: "How to Use Economic Theory to Improve Estimators: Shrinking Toward Theoretical Restrictions