Suchergebnisse

In summer 2007, the US subprime crisis emerged and economic growth in industrialised countries started to slow down. The situation deteriorated after the default of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and despite massive government interventions, the United States and most European countries slid into recession. We investigate the influence of the recent economic and financial crisis on European labour market perspectives and educational attainment decisions. Furthermore we disentangle the differential impacts of the crisis on various demographic subgroups. We find that young male workers have been hit hardest, while older workers and women have been partially protected by non-redeemable contracts and the fact that they work in sectors which have been less severely hit by the crisis. Focusing on the education sector, it seems that the demand for education increases because individuals try to circumvent the tight labour market, while the supply of education suffers because of the increased pressures on federal budgets in most European countries. However, we conclude that it is too early to make a definite statement because the full impact of the crisis on the education sector is still to come.

In March 2013 around 130 participants from academia, banking and finance, governments and central banking gathered at the premises of the OeNB in Vienna for a conference jointly organized by the European Money and Finance Forum SUERF, the OeNB and the Austrian Society for Bank Research to discuss "The Future of Sovereign Borrowing." The financial, economic and sovereign debt crisis has fundamentally changed the rules of the game in sovereign debt markets, particularly in the euro area, but also beyond its borders. Sovereign bonds are no longer widely perceived as 'risk-free' assets. Even the sovereign bonds of safe-haven countries have come under close scrutiny or lost some of their prime ratings. Yet crisis countries have seen dramatic downgrades of their sovereign debt ratings so that they face soaring risk spreads and unsustainably high financing costs (or even a loss of access to bond market financing), pushing them towards shorter financing or forcing them to rely on financial support from other countries and the international community or massive intervention by central banks.