Thematic Platform "European Union"

The Sustainable Careers for Researcher Empowerment (SECURE) project will develop coordination and support measures to create, trial, implement, and mainstream a common Research Career Framework (RCF) that offers a suite of options to support organisations in the recruitment, employment, training, development, progression, and mobility of researchers with the aim of improving research careers and reducing career precarity. The RCF will recognise the research profession across sectors, provide a career development and progression structure for research careers, recognise both research and transferable skills and competences, facilitate intersectoral collaboration and mobility, and offer solutions to the precariousness of research careers in academia.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is independent in the conduct of monetary policy. However, it is accountable to the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs of the European Parliament. This is implemented via the "Monetary Dialogue". Every three months, the President of the ECB or, occasionally, another member of the ECB's Executive Board appears before the Committee to report on monetary policy and answer questions from Members of Parliament, who are informed in advance by experts. WIFO is part of a consortium of institutes that provides the Committee with independent expert advice on monetary and economic policy for the period 2020-2024.

This project investigates the possibility of the existence of middle-income traps among European NUTS-2 regions. Thus, the study extends the literature on middle-income traps, which has so far mainly focused on the national level, to the subnational level. Given the granularity of regional data, the study aims at improving existing spatial econometric methods by simultaneously accounting for spatial dependence, the nature of spatial spillover processes and the uncertainty regarding alternative definitions of growth regimes. Furthermore, the project focuses on analysing growth determinants of middle-income regions, such as EU regional funds, and studies factors driving regions to falling into and escaping from a middle-income trap.

Within this framework contract with the European Commisssion DG TAXUD specific economic studies in the area of taxation will be commissioned. WIFO has the lead of a consortium which consists of CASE (Poland), Copenhagen Economics (Denmark/International), IEB (Spain), Ifo (Germany), PwC (Belgium/International) and VATT (Finland).

This project uses the rich historic experience of repeated large-scale and unexpected economic (dis-)integrations at the Austrian-Czech border to test the predictions of economic geography models of regional development. In particular we analyse the impact of these dis-integration events on regional development: first, in both Austria and the Czech Republic so that we focus on two countries which for a substantial part of the period analysed were characterised by rather different political regimes and huge differences in incomes and costs, that additionally changed over time; second, for a large set of (dis-)integration episodes that span a period of almost a century so that we compare different (dis-)integration events, that took place at different points in time at which the considered countries differed substantially in income levels and institutions; third, with respect to many potential adjustments (such as population and employment and unemployment growth as well as firm entry and exit) that will inform future research on the mechanisms through which the regional economic effects of integration operate.

Framework Contract with DG TAXUD with reopening of competition for the provision evaluation and impact assessment-related services. WIFO is part of a consortium, led by ECORYS.

In the 2021-2027 programming period there is an enhanced focus on the development of human capital as part of the smart specialisation process and under ESIF funding. As background to a future analysis on the 2021-2027 programming period, an understanding of funding allocations for skills development related to territorial smart specialisation domains in the previous 2014-2020 programming period is needed. In a recent project, the JRC-WIFO database was used to identify ERDF-funded projects that are relevant for HESS. Building on this, the aim of this project is to advance this analysis to ESF-funded projects.

Current research on US monetary policy shocks has improved identification of these shocks considerably. Research on euro area monetary policy has not yet incorporated these methodological advancements; identification is either weak or based on strong assumptions. We adopt the new approaches and sharpen inference on the macroeconomic and financial market effects of ECB monetary policy. In a first step, vector autoregressive models are estimated with Bayesian methods and monetary policy shocks are identified by means of sign restrictions. In a next step, identification is strengthened along two recently proposed dimensions: first, by applying sign restrictions also to the systematic component of monetary policy (Arias et al., 2016) and secondly, by exploiting narrative information on large reduced-form residuals (Antolin-Diaz & Rubio-Ramirez, 2016). We will not only estimate models for the euro area as a whole, but also for small euro area countries, including Austria. By employing a block exogenous framework, we duly take into account the specificity of the euro area as a monetary union of sovereign countries. We will not only present sample-averaged results by means of impulse response analysis and forecast error variance decompositions, but we will focus in particular on time series ("historical") decompositions. We will also apply them to new data in order to quantify in a timely manner the effects of the exit from the zero interest rate environment, which is to be expected over the project horizon.