Publications

Key findings from the OeNB’s 46th Economics Conference in 2019, organized in cooperation with SUERF

In the morning of May 2, 2019, more than 400 participants gathered at the Vienna Marriott Hotel for the OeNB’s 46th Economics Conference. This was the second time the conference has been organized in cooperation with SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum. The conference topic was chosen to mark the 20th anniversary of European monetary union and the euro and thereby offered the opportunity to review the achievements and challenges the euro has brought so far. It also examined the history of the Eurosystem’s monetary policy over the past 20 years, and it discussed the way forward. Several specialized sessions focused on the interaction of various policy areas, notably the interplay between monetary and fiscal stability, monetary and financial stability and the fiscal-financial stability nexus. Three further sessions zoomed in on the international role of the euro, on digital currencies including central bank digital currencies, and on ways how to complete European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).

This article analyzes the equity ratios of Austrian nonfinancial corporations using balance sheet data. According to our data, the median equity ratio is about 34%, subject to strong heterogeneity across industries. While companies with a high share of tangible assets tend to have a low equity ratio, we find hardly any link between the share of intangible assets and the equity ratio. Our results suggest that low-tech companies have a lower equity ratio than companies with a higher level of technology intensity. However, high-tech companies do not generally exhibit a higher equity ratio than medium-tech companies. The median equity ratio of start-ups is higher than the overall median equity ratio but lower than the median equity ratio of all high-tech companies. Furthermore, our data suggest that the relationship between firm size and equity ratio is not linear – up to a certain size, the equity ratio decreases with firm size. At least in part, this might be due to the public information available about firms as we find a strong relationship between opaqueness and firm size. Firm age affects the equity ratio only for the first ten years of company life.

Apart from having been a major driver of subdued inflation developments in most industrialized countries in the past 10–15 years, recent key megatrends in the retail industry, such as globalization and digitalization, also pose a number of new challenges for measuring inflation. This article discusses possible effects of growing Internet use on prices, inflation and official price statistics. There is some evidence that the growing importance of e-commerce in recent years has had a dampening effect on both online and offline prices, although this effect is likely to be small and only temporary until the spread of the internet has stabilized.
To account for the changing consumption habits resulting from web retailing, the methods and procedures for inflation measurement have to be adjusted to the new conditions. Systematically collecting data from online retailers (through web scraping) in addition to monitoring prices at brick-and-mortar stores and expanding monitoring to include smaller towns and rural areas  would reflect new consumption habits and improve the representativeness of the price index. The use of scanner data directly obtained from retailers, furthermore, would allow for a joint analysis of prices and quantities sold, which in turn helps reduce the substitution bias present in conventional price statistics.
At the same time, a long-standing issue remains to be solved in inflation measurement: Although the costs of owner-occupied housing account for a considerable share of the total cost of living of households, they are still not included in the consumer price indices of European countries due to methodological complexities. In this respect, experimental evidence indicates that – under normal circumstances – including these costs in official price statistics will most likely not change the euro area inflation figures by much.