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Further publications: Christine Zulehner (33 hits)

Franz Hackl, Michael Hölzl-Leitner, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, Christine Zulehner
Managerial and Decision Economics, 2021, 42, pp.1284-1305, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/mde.3309
The choice of an appropriate e-commerce strategy for the listing in price comparison platforms (eBay, Amazon, and price search engines) is crucial for the survival of online stores in B2C e-commerce business. We use a comprehensive dataset from the Austrian price search engine geizhals.at to identify successful e-commerce strategies with regard to these listing decisions. An e-commerce strategy is a set of choices including the listing decision, availability decision, and decisions on a price path and shipping cost. We apply cluster analysis to identify the different strategies that have been used by online retailers. Using various success measures such as revenue, clicks, market share, and the survival of firms, as dependent variables in our regression analyses, we present causal evidence on the effectiveness of different e-commerce strategies.
Franz Hackl, Michael Hölzl-Leitner, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer, Christine Zulehner
Managerial and Decision Economics, 2021, https://ideas.repec.org/p/jku/econwp/2018_10.html
The choice of an appropriate e-commerce strategy is crucial for the survival of online stores in B2C e-commerce business. We use a comprehensive data set from the Austrian price search engine geizhals.at to identify successful e-commerce strategies. An e-commerce strategy is a set of choices including the listing decision, availability decision, and decisions on price and shipping cost. We apply cluster analysis to identify the different strategies that have been used by online retailers. Using various success measures such as revenue, clicks, market share, and the survival of firms, as dependent variables in our regression analyses, we present empirical evidence on the effectiveness of different e-commerce strategies.
To estimate the differential effects of increased product demand on the demand for labor before and during the recent economic crisis, we use a combination of detailed employment data and the outcomes of public procurement auctions. We compare the employment reactions of the winner of an auction with the employment reactions of the second ranked firm (i.e., the runner-up firm). Assuming similar ex-ante winning probabilities for both firms, we view winning an auction as an exogenous shock to a firm's production and its demand for labor. Detailed daily employment data cover almost 600 construction firms and over 2500 auctions in Austria over the time period 2006 to 2009. Our main results show that the winning firm significantly increases labor demand in the weeks following an auction but only in the years before the recent economic crisis. It employs about 80 workers (around 3 more after the auction than the runner-up firm. Most of the adjustment takes place within one month after the demand shock. Winners predominantly fire fewer workers after winning than runner-up firms. In the crisis, however, firms do not employ more workers than their competitors after winning an auction. There are no effects on wages. We view labor hoarding and productivity improvements induced by the crisis as the most likely explanations for our findings. We also discuss implications for fiscal and stimulus policy in the crisis.
In this paper, we analyze the effect of market power on the share of females in top management positions using data from a market in which some firms have market power due to an institutionalized cartel. We investigate collegiate athletics and interpret coaches as top-level managers or chief executive officers (CEOs). The causal link between market power and female employment is established by exploiting the existence of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) as an exogenous shock. Our results show that an increase in the market share has a negative effect on females relative to males among coaches. We interpret this as clear evidence for Becker's (1957) theory on employer discrimination. Only firms operating in an oligopolistic or otherwise not perfectly competitive environment can sustain a taste or cost of discrimination. Market power is necessary to let firms share rents with their workers, which they do in a discriminatory way.
We examine the gender wage gap in Austria from 2005 to 2017 using data from EU-SILC. The raw wage gap declined from 18.6 log points in 2005 to 14.9 log points in 2017. We use standard decomposition techniques that correct for differences in the distributions of human capital, and other variables, between men and women. All calculated decompositions indicate that the unexplained part of the gender wage gap decreased substantially over the last ten years. The decrease of the unexplained gender wage gap between the largest gap in this period (2006) and the most recent gap (2017) ranges from 3.7 log points to 8.5 log points depending on the decomposition approach. Using the approach developed by Neumark (1988), the corrected wage gap shrank from 8.7 (8.8) log points in 2005 (2006) to 5.1 log points in 2017. The main reason for the decline in wage differences is the relative improvement of women's observed and unobserved characteristics.
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2019, 11, (1), pp.157-184, https://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/aejmic/v11y2019i1p157-84.html
We investigate the role of competition on the outcome of Austrian Treasury auctions. Austria's EU accession led to an increase in the number of banks participating in treasury auctions. We use structural estimates of bidders' private values to examine the effect of increased competition on auction performance. We find robust evidence that bidders' surplus dropped sharply after EU accession, but less than reduced form estimates would suggest. The difference can be explained by reduced form estimates not taking into account the increase in valuations upon EU accession.
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2019, (11), pp.1-29
In this paper, we assess the impact of competition, investment, and regulation on prices of mobile services in France. We estimate hedonic price regressions using data on tariff plans offered by the main mobile telecommunications operator in France between May 2011 and December 2014. In this time period, the obtained quality‐adjusted price index decreased by about 42.8 percent as compared to a decline in weighted average prices without quality‐adjustment of 8.7 percent. In a second step, we relate the quality‐adjusted prices to a set of competition, investment, and regulation variables and find that the launch of 4G networks by mobile operators was the main driver of price reductions for classic tariffs with commitment. Low‐cost tariffs without commitment which were introduced to pre‐empt the entry of low‐cost competitor declined at the time of entry. Moreover, we find that regulation, which is approximated by the level of mobile termination charges and international roaming price caps for voice and data, has a joint significant impact on quality‐adjusted prices. In percentage terms, competition is responsible for about 23.4 percent of total price decline and investments in 4G for 56.1 percent. We conclude that the reduction in quality‐adjusted prices in the last years was largely caused by competition between operators for a new 4G technology and by entry of a fourth low‐cost operator.
Cartels were legal to a large extent in Austria until the country’s EU accession in 1995. We examine archival material on registered horizontal cartels to learn about their inner working. Applying content analysis to legally binding cartel contracts, we comprehensively document different collusion methods along the lines described by Stigler (J Political Econ 72:44–61, 1964). Quota cartels employ regular reporting schemes and use compensation mechanisms for departures from set quotas. Specialization cartels divide markets, and rely the least on information exchange and punishment. Price and payment condition cartels primarily aim to prevent secret price cuts, requiring information provision upon request, allow for discretionary decision-taking and (sometimes immediate) punishment. These stylized facts on the contractual arrangements suggest that the possibility to write legally binding agreements was employed to address the usual obstacles to sustain collusion.
The availability of affordable formal child care is an important determinant of the labour force participation of parents, particularly of mothers, which is increasingly discussed. This paper examines the impact of child-care costs on the employment rates of mothers with children younger than 12 years. Using data from the 1995 and 2002 Austrian Microcensus, combined with administrative wage data from Austrian tax records, we estimate the impact of net wages and child-care costs on mothers’ employment probabilities. In line with theoretical considerations and most of the empirical literature, we find a negative elasticity of mothers’ employment rates to child-care costs as well as positive elasticity with regard to net wages. The point estimates for the impact of net wages and child-care costs are of similar absolute size. Additionally, the empirical results indicate that higher family income reduces the employment probability of mothers.
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