Vorträge im Wintersemester 2014/15

Integrated Segregation: Trends in the Austrian Gender Division of Labour

Using micro data from the Austrian Labor Force Survey, this paper explores how decreases in the gender differential in participation rates together with increasing differentials in the incidence of part-time jobs and stable or rising levels of occupational segregation by gender affect the gender division of labor. To so so, we propose an index for the gender division of labor based on the Mutual Information index. Our main results show that the gender division of labor is very stable along the 16-year period. This is so because although the rising female labor force participation reduces the gender division of labor, increases in gender differences in the incidence of part-time jobs and increases in occupational segregation result in greater division of labor across genders. These results are robust to alternative definitions of economic activity and labor market involvement and can also be found after controlling for educational levels and fields.

The paper is joint work with Ricardo Mora, Department of Economics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Drei Wege zur Zähmung des Kapitalismus. Die Wahrnehmung und Beurteilung sozialer Ungleichheit in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz

Ein zentraler Aspekt des neuen Turbokapitalismus ist die Zunahme der Einkommensungleichheit. In diesem Vortrag wird auf der Basis der International Social Survey Programm 2009 (Social Inequality) dargestellt, wie die Menschen in den drei Ländern die Ungleichheit wahrnehmen. Trotz relativ geringer objektiver Ungleichheit ist die Beurteilung sehr kritisch. Nimmt die Bevölkerung die Realität verzerrt wahr? Unsere These ist, dass diese Wahrnehmung und Urteile selber eine wesentliche Determinante der Entwicklung des Kapitalismus in den drei Ländern zusammenhängen. Dazu werden konkrete Hypothesen entwickelt und empirisch getestet.

Size Distribution, Stochastic Elements, and the Representative Agent

Individuals differ in many respects among each other. Yet, on the aggregate level there seems to be a population structure that is stable across time and similar in a cross-section. Since the work by Pareto (1898) we know that many different ”stock variables” are distributed according to a Power Law. In this short notice, we want to show why that is the case. Moreover, we discuss which opportunities arise from including of this observation in macro models.

House Price Indices. Why Measurement matters and how it can be done.

Monitoring the development of the housing market is important, particularly in times of economic turbulence. Yet the construction of house price indices is challenging and several approaches co-exist. In this talk, I will focus on the construction of hedonic residential property price indices. Hedonic approaches allow measuring quality-adjusted movements in house prices over time. All hedonic approaches share in common that indices are calculated period-wise, i.e., it is assumed that indices do not change within a time interval of predetermined length. The shorter a period the more precise the index. However, choosing the length of a period is subject to certain practical limitations: There have to be considerably large numbers of observations in each period to calculate reliable estimates. Considering the housing market there are usually too few transactions to construct monthly or even weekly or daily indices. I propose a method that allows measurement on an arbitrarily small time interval. Continuous time hedonic methods entirely drop the topic of accurate period length selection and rather measure time on a continuous scale. This is performed by estimating the time effect as a smooth function using penalized regression techniques. Using data for Sydney, Australia, over the period from 2001 to 2011 I compare the resulting indices from this model to those from standard hedonic models and median price indices for different period lengths, i.e., years, half-years, quarters and months. I find that indices differ significantly both in terms of turning points and the index level. Furthermore, discrete indices converge in some sense to the smoothly estimated index with decreasing period lengths. The continuous index moreover has some appealing robustness properties. I will use both penalized least squares and penalized quantile regression approaches to construct continuous indices and point out the compelling advantages of quantile regression techniques in this context.

The effect of correlated news reports on financial markets
Michael Razen, Michael Kirchler, Stefan Palan

This study explores the role of correlated news reports on prices and on subjects' expectations and trading behavior in sealed bid-ask call auction and continuous double auction asset markets. We derive theoretical predictions and experimental results for situations where market participants receive (i) private, uncorrelated information, (ii) multiple pieces of private information which are correlated with each other, or (iii) public information which is known to all market participants. Our results show that traders submit suboptimal orders and generally fail to fully account for the information available to them. We furthermore find no differences between the two market mechanisms in terms of price efficiency.

Economic Climate Change Impacts at the National Level: Known Trends, Unknown Tails, and Unknowables
Karl W. Steininger, Gernot Wagner, Paul Watkiss, Martin König

Economists attempting to evaluate the impacts of climate change are often caught between hard theory and exceedingly rocky empirics. Impact assessment models are necessarily based on highly aggregated – and sometimes highly simplified – damage functions. This study takes an alternative approach: a bottom-up, physical impact assessment and respective monetization, attempting to cover a much broader set of impact fields, feeding directly into a macroeconomic and welfare analysis at the national level. To ensure consistency, our approach applies impact assessment at the sectoral impact chain level using shared socioeconomic pathways, consistent climate scenarios, computable general equilibrium evaluation, and non-market impact evaluation. The approach is applied to assess a broad scope of climate impacts in Austria. Results indicate significant impacts around 'known knowns' (such as changes in agricultural yield from climatic shifts), with uncertainty increased by 'known unknowns' (e.g. changes in water availability for irrigation, changes in pest and diseases) but also raises the question of unknowns and unknowables, which may possibly dominate future impacts (such as exceedance of critical ecosystem function for supporting agriculture). Climate change, ultimately, is a risk management problem, where insurance thinking warrants significant mitigation (and adaptation) action today.

Analysis of the study result indicate that the current welfare damage of climate and weather induced extreme events in Austria is an annual average of € 1 billion (large events only). This has the potential to rise to € 4 to 5 billion by mid-century (annual average, known knowns of impact chains only), with an uncertainty range of € 4 to 9 billion. When extreme events and the tails of their distribution are included, even for a partial analysis focused on extremes, damages are seen to rise significantly, e.g. with an estimated increase to € 40 billion due to riverine flooding events alone by the end of the century. These highlight the need to consider the distribution of impacts, as well as the central values.

Clustering Customers in the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Multiple Service Workers

In ever growing urban areas, space becomes increasingly valuable. Hence, smaller stores servicing local customers may not be able to provide dedicated parkings. This lack of space to park, even though encouraging alternative means of transport, constitutes a problem for the stores' suppliers. Virtually all routing applications as well as academic papers implicitly assume that it is possible to stop at the desired destination. However, this assumption doesn't hold if there are no parking spaces available that could fit a delivery truck.

Given these circumstances, distribution planning requires clustering nearby customers around known parking locations. Deliveries from each parking location to its assigned customers occur by foot. These lead to long service times at each of the clusters. However, long service times in conjunction with time windows can lead to inefficient routes as nearby customer clusters with overlapping service times may not be connected. As a consequence, assigning additional service workers to each vehicle is a strategy to reduce service times and hence permit more efficient routes. The trade-off between paying additional workers to reduce costs for vehicles and driving creates a new decision problem called the vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple service workers (VRPTWMS).

The present work introduces a cluster first, route second algorithm to solve the complete VRPTWMS. At the time of this writing, no prior work describes an algorithm for combining customers to clusters with a parking space while honoring time constraints. To tackle this issue, relevant characteristics, parameters and issues when combining customers with time windows are identified. Since the clusters do not have an objective function for themselves, they are created using an intermediary attractiveness function that allows for good solutions of the combined problem. To further improve solution quality, an ant colony optimization provides feedback to the clustering heuristic in order to allow learning from the best prior routing solutions.

Investment Effects of Taxes on Capital under Uncertainty and Irreversibility
Rainer Niemann and Caren Sureth (Universität Paderborn)

We analyze the impact of taxes on capital on investment timing under uncertainty and irreversibility. We integrate wealth-related taxes into a real options model of the Dixit/Pindyck type. The wealth tax parameters included are the wealth tax rate, the initial and subsequent valuation of assets for wealth tax purposes, the valuation method (historical costs versus fair value accounting) and the wealth tax treatment of the default alternative. We find that increases of the wealth tax rate can either accelerate or delay investment. This ambiguous result implies that higher wealth tax rates can stimulate or depress the propensity to invest in risky projects. By contrast, the valuation effects are unambiguous: higher initial or subsequent valuation of assets for wealth tax purposes delays investment. The investment timing effects regarding either historical cost valuation or fair value accounting are ambiguous. Although our model takes an individual perspective, it is also relevant for the current tax policy discussion on the introduction of a general wealth tax. To avoid misleading statements concerning possible distributional consequences of wealth-related taxes, a preceding analysis of the economic effects of is necessary.

Foreign Ownership Effects of Introducing a Cross-Border Group Taxation Regime - Empirical Evidence from Austria
Silke Rünger ist Alleinautorin des zugehörigen Papers

Starting in 2005, Austria has implemented a new group taxation system, which allows for foreign subsidiaries to be included into a tax group and current tax losses of foreign group members to be offset against tax profits of other domestic group members. In this paper, foreign ownership effects resulting from Austrian group taxation are empirically analyzed for the first time. Results obtained from the analysis of 37,423 Austrian companies over a period of 10 years show that, despite an increase in foreign ownership among Austrian companies, the increase cannot be attributed to group taxation. Additionally, I can show that foreign ownership among Austrian holding companies has significantly increased after the introduction of the group taxation. Group taxation has not changed foreign ownership on a widespread basis, but advantages of group taxation have been recognized by foreign multinational companies and empirical evidence of tax-efficient group restructuring can be shown.