We assess the effectiveness of the financial sector stabilisation measures taken by the Austrian authorities in the wake of the global financial crisis. Employing an event study methodology, we evaluate domestic and cross-border effects involving Central, Eastern and South-eastern European economies. We identify recapitalisations and public guarantees as the most effective sovereign interventions. Both mitigate financial market stress at home and abroad. However, a risk-shifting effect emerges at the sovereign's expense which undermines their effectiveness relative to monetary policy interventions. Moreover, in complement to the actual implementation, the mere announcement of interventions already mitigates financial market stress, underscoring the extent of policy credibility.

Projections show sharp increases in public spending on long-term care (LTC) services across Europe. However, a purely cost-based focus on LTC services is economically misleading. Private and public expenditure on LTC services directly and indirectly generates income in the form of salaries, taxes, and social security contributions. The aim of this paper is to quantify the economic impact and multipliers of LTC services for Austria. Based on an econometric regional Input-Output model for Austria, we estimate the direct, indirect, and induced effects of public and private expenditures on value added, employment, taxes, and social security contributions. According to our results, each euro spent on LTC services is associated with domestic value added of 1.70 €; 70 cents per euro spent flows into public budgets in the form of taxes and social security contributions. The economic multipliers of the LTC services are comparatively high due to the high share of wages and salaries in direct expenditure and the associated high direct value added. Public expenditure on professional care services should therefore not be regarded merely as a cost factor in the public budget. Rather, this rapidly growing economic sector is also an increasingly important economic factor in a time of ageing societies. While the model does not provide information on the causal economic effect of the LTC sector, the findings are still highly important for planners of LTC reforms, as they provide information on the total value added associated with LTC expenditures and on the total number of jobs that these expenditures sustain.

In view of the challenges posed by climate change and the increasingly ambitious climate targets around the world, the search for effective climate policy instruments is gaining momentum. Carbon pricing, for example, in the form of a carbon tax, and its effects are therefore attracting increasing attention in academic as well as policy discussions. We review the empirical effects of carbon taxes with regard to several impact dimensions commonly studied in the literature: environmental effectiveness, macroeconomic effects, impacts on competitiveness and innovation, distributional implications, and public acceptance. An increasing body of empirical studies shows that carbon taxes can effectively reduce carbon emissions or at least dampen their growth while not negatively affecting economic growth, employment, and competitiveness. The existing empirical evidence suggests that the distributional impact of carbon taxes depends on the type of energy use and the indicators to capture distributional effects, as well as on household characteristics. Lump-sum transfers are shown to be better suited to mitigate regressive effects for lower incomes, while higher incomes benefit more from a reduction of labour taxes. Public acceptance of carbon taxes can be increased by providing public information, avoiding negative distributional effects, and channelling part of the revenues into "environmental projects".

The paper introduces a novel indicator of technological relatedness across firms. It considers both imported inputs and exported products to assess the similarity of firms in terms of their technological capabilities in Austria. The indicator captures technological similarity more closely than measures relying solely on exported products or overlapping industry classes. Descriptive results indicate that companies that are more closely related in the import-export product space also export and import more complex products. More complex products in turn are related to higher labor productivity levels. The impact of the proposed measure for bilateral corporate coherence on the production costs of firms is assessed by firm-level quadratic cost functions. The results indicate that bilateral coherence and related spillovers have a significant negative impact on the total cost of production of firms on average. The associated cost reduction effect follows a mildly U-shaped pattern. The paper also assesses the impact of bilateral coherence on the margins of trade at the firm level. The results indicate that firms with a higher bilateral coherence, and associated spillovers, have a positive impact on the diversification of both the export portfolio and imported inputs. The impacts on intensive margins and both import and export concentration are more ambiguous.