Person: Oberhofer, Harald
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Oberhofer, Harald, Oberhofer, H.
Fields of Specialization
industrial organization; labor economics; applied econometrics; international economics
Degrees
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Last updated:January 31, 2023
Biography
Harald Oberhofer is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department for Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Salzburg. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Innsbruck. His research interests are in the fields of Industrial Organization, Labor Economics, Applied Econometrics and International Economics.
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Publication Firm Growth and Productivity in Belarus : New Empirical Evidence from the Machine Building Industry(Elsevier, 2013-07-25) Crespo Cuaresma, Jesus; Oberhofer, Harald; Vincelette, Gallina A.Using a unique dataset comprising information for (up to) 153 firms in the machine building sector in Belarus, we investigate the determinants of firm growth for an economy where state ownership of enterprises is widespread. We use panel data models based on generalizations of Gibrat’s law, total factor productivity estimates and matching methods to assess the differences in firm growth between private and state-controlled firms. Our results indicate that labor hoarding and soft budget constraints play a particularly important role in explaining differences in performance between these two groups of firms.Publication Determinants of Job Creation in Eleven New EU Member States : Evidence from Firm Level Data(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-07) Vincelette, Gallina A.; Oberhofer, HaraldThis paper builds on the analysis of job creation developed in World Bank (2013) to provide an empirical investigation of the industry and firm-specific determinants of the job creation process in eleven new European Union (EU11) economies. It relies on the Amadeus dataset of firms during 2002-2009. The main results indicate that during the years prior to the global financial crisis, traditional industries were crucial for the net creation of jobs in EU11. However, traditional industries were the ones most severely affected by the financial crisis. By contrast, services firms were less vulnerable to the economic downturn. At the firm level, small and young firms registered the highest employment growth rates. The empirical results also indicate that more productive firms tended to be less vulnerable to economic downturns. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the perceived quality of the business climate by the EU11 enterprises is correlated with not only the firms' employment growth, but also their productivity. In the post-crisis period, poor business restrictions were negatively associated with the creation of jobs. All these findings hold for the group of high-growth firms that disproportionately accounted for the creation of new jobs in the EU11 economies.Publication Drivers of Convergence in Eleven Eastern European Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-08) Cuaresma, Jesus Crespo; Oberhofer, Harald; Smits, Karlis; Vincelette, Gallina AThis paper investigates the drivers of growth and prosperity in a group of eleven European countries -- Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, and Slovakia (the EU11). Since the EU11 began the transformation process, this group of emerging countries has made impressive strides as developing market economies and is anchoring development in European Union institutions. There are reasons to believe that the convergence of EU11 income per capita to Western European levels will continue, but will proceed more slowly. The paper concludes that trade and financial integration have sped along at a spectacular pace in the EU11 in the recent past, although trade in modern services and the integration of government bond and equity markets are somewhat behind. As in the rest of Europe, demographic developments will pose huge challenges for the sustainability of public finance in the EU11 economies. In the next several decades, the EU11 labor force is expected to contract more than labor forces in the rest of the European Union, making it even more urgent that countries in the region reform pension systems, change migration policy, and find incentives to attract talent to the region. Closing the gap with the rest of the European Union in educational attainment levels and improving education quality might significantly soften the constraints imposed by the demographic threats and produce sizable returns in terms of additional income convergence.Publication Firm Growth and Productivity in Belarus : New Empirical Evidence from the Machine Building Industry(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-03) Crespo Cuaresma, Jesus; Oberhofer, Harald; Vincelette, Gallina A.Using a unique dataset comprising information for more than 900 firms in the machine building sector in Belarus, this paper investigates the determinants of firm growth for an economy where state ownership of enterprises is widespread. It uses panel data models based on generalizations of Gibrat's law, total factor productivity estimates and matching methods to assess the differences in firm growth between private and state-owned firms. The results indicate that labor hoarding and soft budget constraints play a particularly important role in explaining differences in performance between these two groups of firms.