The Austrian Phillips Curve Reconsidered, Empirica, Austrian Economic Papers, 1/85, 43-65, 1985.
It is often maintained that the Austrian Inflation-Unemployment trade off was remarkable stable during the 70ies and even at the beginning of the 80ies. This astonishing "stability" of the Austrian Phillips Curve and its only weak tendency to show inflation cycles compared to other countries is hard to explain by received inflation theory and it was therefore attributed to so called non-market factors (e.g. the Austrian Social partnership). In this paper we investigate whether the Curve was actually stable or whether the Austrian Phillips Curve is a case of "spurious stability", that is, an outcome of a mis-specified regression. It turns out that taking account for a variable natural rate of unemployment, the "stability" disappears and also the observed change in the direction of the inflation cycles can be explained by standard theory. There is no need to employ institutional factors.

Ökonometrische Auswertung der Haushaltsstatistik der Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte in Wien, Verkehrs Annalen - Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Verkehrswissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, 29-43, 1/1987.
In dieser Arbeit wird mit Hilfe der Haushaltsstatistik der Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte die Nachfrage privater Haushalte nach privaten und öffentlichen Verkehrsleistungen untersucht. Besonderes Augenmerk wird den Preis-, Kreuzpreis-, und Einkommenselastizitäten gewidmet. Bei den ökonotmetrischen Schätzungen werden sowohl Einzelgleichungsverfahren als auch Systemschätzungen (sog. Rotterdam Modell) angewendet. Letztere berücksichtigen alle Restriktionen, welche die Nutzenmaximierungshypothese unter den üblichen Annahmen den beobachteten Daten auferlegt, das sind insbesondere Homogenitätseigenschaften und die Symmetrie der kompensierten Kreuzpreiselastizitäten.

Long-Term Impacts of Import Prices on Domestic Prices and Wages, An Empirical Investigation for Austria, Empirica, Austrian Economic Papers, 15-40 1/90, 1990.
The paper investigates long run relationships between prices, wages, productivity and import prices by means of a theoretical model and empirical estimation. As we found several cointegration vectors (using "Johanson's procedure") among those variables, an interpretation problem arose. In this article we employed a transformation of the estimated cointegration space which allows to interpret the cointegration vectors as long run multipliers in response to exogenous shocks in import prices. The estimated effects turns out to be strong - they are somewhat higher than those in other studies - and robust against variations in the set of variables. The appendix investigates which assumptions are necessary to justify such a transformation.

Tax and Spend or Spend and Tax, An Empirical Investigation for Austria, gemeinsam mit St. Koren, Empirica, Journal of Applied Economics and Economic Policy, 2/22, 127-149, 1995.
The aim of this contribution is to discriminate between the rivaling spend and tax and tax and spend hypotheses in order to check empirically the relationship between government spending and taxation decisions in Austria. For that purpose, the authors estimate a tri-variate structural VAR Model of Austria's public sector that, besides expenditures and revenues, includes aggregate income as an additional variable. Great care is taken in finding appropriate identifying restrictions. They implement impulse-response functions and frequency domain techniques in order to identify the causal relation between government outlays and receipts. The budget making process is interpreted as an error correction model which allows to estimate to what extent revenues and expenditures are adjusted whenever the government sees its long run budget constraint violated. The empirical findings strongly support the spend and tax view that budget decision-making is significantly dominated by the expenditure side in Austria.

A Spectral Decomposition for Structural VAR Models, Empirical Economics, 21/96, 535-555, 1996.
Based on structural VARs, this paper proposes a spectral decomposition - we call it causality spectra - which allows to infer the effects of changes in one variable on the other variables in the frequency domain. It is shown that there is a close relationship between this concept and conventional forecast error variance decomposition techniques for VARs, but our procedure turns out to have some advantages in interpreting long run as well as cyclical effects, especially in the case of stationary variables. As our starting point is a structural VAR model a causal interpretation is possible. To demonstrates the usefulness of this additional tool in analyzing the relationships among time series we applied this technique to income and consumption data and compared the results to the a theoretical permanent income consumption model with adaptive, respectively rational expectations.

Tax and Spend or Spend and Tax? An International Study, gemeinsam mit St. Koren, Journal of Policy Modelling, April/1998.
This work tries to discriminate between the spend and tax and tax and spend hypotheses in order to check empirically the relationship between government spending and taxation decisions in nine OECD countries. For that purpose, a tri-variate structural VAR Model for each countries public sector is estimated that, besides expenditures and revenues, includes aggregate income as an additional variable. Impulse-response functions and new frequency domain techniques are used in order to identify the causal relation between government outlays and receipts. The budget making process is interpreted as an error correction model which allows to estimate to what extent revenues and expenditures are adjusted whenever the government sees its long run budget constraint violated. After construction of a frequency domain based index, which measures the degree of the tax and spend behavior the empirical findings strongly support the spend and tax view for Italy, Austria and France. The opposite (tax and spend hypotheses) seems to be true for the UK, Netherlands, FRG and the USA. For Switzerland and Sweden neither forces are apparent.

Wage Setting and Hysteresis in Unemployment, Empirica, Journal of Applied Economics and Economic Policy, 25, 1998.
This paper tries to answer the question why unemployment remains so high in most industrialized countries. After discussing some methodological issues the following questions are investigated by means of a theoretical wage bargaining model which is then estimated with Austrian data using time varying parameter methods: Are there any significant hysteresis or persistence effects in the sense that exogenous shocks lead to permanent effects on unemployment? Are there any changes in the wage setting behavior during the period of investigation (1956 to 1994)? Is the evidence consistent with the Blanchard-Summers variant of the insider-outsider hypotheses? Is there any significant effect of the duration of unemployment on wage setting? Is the slowdown of productivity growth of any importance for wage setting? Is there evidence of a substantial change in the natural (equilibrium) rate of unemployment? Has there ever been a Phillips Curve in Austria?

An Analysis on the Structural Stability of Okun's Law - A Cross Country Study, Journal of Applied Economics, 14, 2002.
In this article we investigate Okun's Law for 15 OECD countries.We first check whether there are significant differences in this relationship among the 15 countries and what are possible causes of these differences. In a second step we examine the stability of Okuns's Law. By using data on employment and the labor force, whether structural instability is caused either form the demand side or supply side is inferred.