Vienna University of Economics and Business
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The Effects of Cooperative Compliance on Firms’ Tax Risk, Tax Risk Management and Compliance Costs
Get PDFIn cooperative compliance programs, firms and tax administrations agree on cooperation instead of confrontation. Firms provide full transparency and advanced tax control frameworks. Tax administrations, in turn, offer certainty as to the tax treatment of complex transactions. In this study, we test how firms’ perceptions of tax risk, the quality of tax risk management, and compliance costs are related to cooperative compliance. To our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to analyze both reasons for and consequences of participation in cooperative compliance programs. We examine the Austrian cooperative compliance pilot project known as horizontal monitoring that was aimed at large businesses and launched in 2011. We use survey data from representatives of firms participating in the pilot project and a sample of comparable firms under a traditional ex-post audit regime. We conduct group comparisons to test differences between these groups, as well as mediation analyses to shed light on more complex relationships between variables. Results show that horizontal monitoring firms perceive a significantly higher increase in tax certainty, which is associated with significant relative decreases in tax risk and compliance costs. Furthermore, while the quality of tax risk management upon entering the pilot project appears significantly higher for horizontal monitoring firms, they do not report greater improvement in tax risk management compared to the control group. These results are relevant for the development of cooperative compliance programs and the decision to participate in them
Global dynamics and country-level development in academic economics: An explorative cognitive-bibliometric study
Get PDFThe structure of academic economics has received a fair amount of attention within and beyond the
discipline. Less focus has been given the interdependencies of country and global dynamics.
Building and advancing this tradition, this explorative study examines geographic variation and
country specific developments in research practices in academic economics. More specifically I
investigate the interdependencies of global dynamics with country-level developments in the US,
Germany, UK, France, Switzerland and Austria. To that purpose the study investigates a
large-scale data set using inequality measures and social network analysis. The dataset analysed
in this study comprises 453,863 articles published in 477 journals citing each other a total of
3,807,289 times. This exploratory study confirms the high level of concentration and finds similar
trends on the country level. Further, an international convergence in the discipline can be
observed, possibly limiting the place-specific relevance of knowledge created in academic
economics.Series: SRE - Discussion Paper
Do Corporate Taxes Affect Executive Compensation?
Get PDFThe limitation of executive compensation has been a matter of public and policy debate for at least 20 years. We examine a first-time regulatory action where the deductibility of the total value of executive compensation is unavoidably limited. We find no average effects on pay growth for executives. However, pay growth decreases for new executives and very distinct groups of incumbent managers, indicating that they are affected by the deductibility limit. Additionally, the contract durations of incumbent executives decrease after renegotiation. We further find that affected firms experience cuts in investment and research and development. Our results could shed light on other reforms, such as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, indicating that the effectiveness of such reforms in restricting executive pay is rather limited.Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Serie
Wireless Home Blood Pressure Monitoring System With Automatic Outcome-Based Feedback and Financial Incentives to Improve Blood Pressure in People With Hypertension: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial
Get PDFBackground: Hypertension is prevalent in Singapore and is a major risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality and increased health care costs. Strategies to lower blood pressure include lifestyle modifications and home blood pressure monitoring. Nonetheless, adherence to home blood pressure monitoring remains low. This protocol details an algorithm for remote management of primary care patients with hypertension.
Objective: The objective of this study was to determine whether wireless home blood pressure monitoring with or without financial incentives is more effective at reducing systolic blood pressure than nonwireless home blood pressure monitoring (usual care).
Methods: This study was designed as a randomized controlled open-label superiority study. A sample size of 224 was required to detect differences of 10 mmHg in average systolic blood pressure. Participants were to be randomized, in the ratio of 2:3:3, into 1 of 3 parallel study arms :(1) usual care, (2) wireless home blood pressure monitoring, and (3) wireless home blood pressure monitoring with financial incentives. The primary outcome was the mean change in systolic blood pressure at month 6. The secondary outcomes were the mean reduction in diastolic blood pressure, cost of financial incentives, time taken for the intervention, adherence to home blood pressure monitoring, effectiveness of the framing of financial incentives in decreasing nonadherence to blood pressure self-monitoring and the adherence to antihypertensive medication at month 6.
Results: This study was approved by SingHealth Centralised Institutional Review Board and registered. Between January 24, 2018 and July 10, 2018, 42 participants (18.75% of the required sample size) were enrolled, and 33 participants completed the month 6 assessment by January 31, 2019
Home, sweet home? The impact of working from home on the division of unpaid work during the COVID-19 lockdown
Get PDFA lockdown implies a shift from the public to the private sphere, and from market to non-market production, thereby increasing the volume of unpaid work. Already before the pandemic, unpaid work was disproportionately borne by women. This paper studies the effect of working from home for pay (WFH), due to a lockdown, on the change in the division of housework and childcare within couple households. While previous studies on the effect of WFH on the reconciliation of work and family life and the division of labour within the household suffered from selection bias, we are able to identify this effect by drawing upon the shock of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Austria. The corresponding legal measures left little choice over WFH. In any case, WFH is exogenous, conditional on a small set of individual and household characteristics we control for. We employ data from a survey on the gendered aspects of the lockdown. The dataset includes detailed information on time use during the lockdown and on the quality and experience of WFH. Uniquely, this survey data also includes information on the division, and not only magnitude, of unpaid work within households. Austria is an interesting case in this respect as it is characterized by very conservative gender norms. The results reveal that the probability of men taking on a larger share of housework increases if men are WFH alone or together with their female partner. By contrast, the involvement of men in childcare increased only in the event that the female partner was not able to WFH. Overall, the burden of childcare, and particularly homeschooling, was disproportionately borne by women
Assessing the value of household work based on wages demanded on online platforms for substitutes
No full textWe propose an improved method to assess the economic value of unpaid housework
and childcare. Existing literature has typically assigned a minimum, generalist or
specialist’s wage, or the performer’s opportunity cost to the hourly value of these
activities. Then it was used to calculate macro-level value based on the number of
hours spent in this work. In this paper, instead of imputing an average or minimum
wage for housework and childcare to determine a value to the work, we use the actual
local wage rate requested for these services from providers on online platforms.
Applying this method to Austrian Time Use Survey data shows that the value of
unpaid childcare and housework, had it been paid, would be equivalent to about 22%
of the 2018 GDP
Measuring the interestingness of temporal logic behavioral specifications in process mining
Get PDFThe assessment of behavioral rules with respect to a given dataset is key in several research areas, including declarative process mining, association rule mining, and specification mining. An assessment is required to check how well a set of discovered rules describes the input data, and to determine to what extent data complies with predefined rules. Particularly in declarative process mining, Support and Confidence are used most often, yet they are reportedly unable to provide a sufficiently rich feedback to users and cause rules representing coincidental behavior to be deemed as representative for the event logs. In addition, these measures are designed to work on a predefined set of rules, thus lacking generality and extensibility. In this paper, we address this research gap by developing a measurement framework for temporal rules based on (LTLp). The framework is suitable for any temporal rules expressed in a reactive form and for custom measures based on the probabilistic interpretation of such rules. We show that our framework can seamlessly adapt well-known measures of the association rule mining field to declarative process mining. Also, we test our software prototype implementing the framework on synthetic and real-world data, and investigate the properties characterizing those measures in the context of process analysis
COVID-19: Studie zur finanziellen Lage der Wiener Sozialwirtschaft
Get PDFDie COVID-19-Pandemie stellt alle Gesellschaftsbereiche vor Herausforderungen. Dies gilt im besonderen Maße für Organisationen im Sozial- und Gesundheitsbereich. Bereits im Sommer 2020 hat die Studie „Auswirkungen der COVID-19 Pandemie auf die soziale Infrastruktur in Österreich“ (Millner et al., 2020) deutlich gemacht, in welchen Bereichen Sozialorganisationen in Österreich aufgrund der pandemiebedingten Einschränkungen sowie der gesetzlichen Maßnahmen zur Eindämmung der Pandemie in ihrer Leistungserstellung stark eingeschränkt waren. Knapp ein Jahr und zwei Pandemie-Wellen später wird im Rahmen der vorliegenden Studie (2021) erneut der Frage nachgegangen, welche Auswirkungen die Krise auf die soziale Infrastruktur, d. h. konkret auf die Organisationen im Bereich sozialer Dienstleistungen, hat. Die Erhebung widmet sich der finanziellen Ist-Situation der Wiener Sozialwirtschaft im Allgemeinen und fokussiert im Besonderen auf die Wiener Trägerorganisationen in den Bereichen „Pflege und Betreuung“, „Behindertenarbeit, Mobilität und Beratung“ sowie „Betreutes Wohnen“. Ziel dieser Studie ist es, eine gegenwärtige Bestandsaufnahme der sozialen Infrastruktur hinsichtlich der Versorgung mit sozialen Dienstleistungen aus betriebswirtschaftlicher Sicht zu erstellen, um etwaige entstehende Lücken durch einen möglichen Ausfall von Organisationen frühzeitig erkennen und gegebenenfalls Maßnahmen ergreifen zu können
Toward a sustainability assessment framework of research impacts: Contributions of a business school
Get PDFBusiness schools have the potential to become an important driver for sustainable development (SD) by broadening their research assessments beyond scientific performance. Assessment frameworks that expand the scope from academic performance to actual contributions to SD can support business schools in this regard. This article addresses the current lack of pluralistic conceptualizations of research impacts and aims to propose an assessment framework and indicators for business school research impacts on SD. It thus investigates the contributions of business school research to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through an explorative case analysis of Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna) and grounded theory's constant comparative method. In doing so, it adds value to the discussion about the societal relevance of business schools and pluralistic assessments of their research impacts. The findings illustrate that business school research impacts the economy, policy making, and education by fostering organizational and systemic change and contributes to overcoming societal and environmental challenges. The proposed framework contributes to shifting the focus of research impact assessment of business schools toward SD. It shows that business schools must holistically recognize their impacts by considering key SD impact areas, impact scope and pathways, and their actual contributions to the SDGs
Effectiveness and efficiency of state aid for new broadband networks: Evidence from OECD member states
Get PDFThe deployment of new broadband networks (NBNs) based on fiber-optic transmission technologies promises high gains in terms of productivity and economic growth, and has attracted subsidies worth billions from governments around the world in the form of various state aid programs. Yet, the effectiveness and the efficiency of such programs remains largely unstudied. We employ panel data from 32 OECD countries during 2002-2019 to provide robust empirical evidence of both. We find that state aid significantly increases NBNs by facilitating the deployment of new connections to 22% of households in the short term and 39.2% in the long term. By comparing the actual amounts of state aid support to the estimated impact on GDP growth, we also find it to be highly cost efficient, as the programs break even after three years on average