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Equal access to childcare services is a key concern of childcare policy. This article analyses social inequalities in the availability of such services. We explore how observed disparities are related to the socio-economic status of neighbourhoods and investigate how different provider types contribute to such differences. To do so, we use data on all childcare centres in the city of Vienna, Austria, on the spatial distribution of children aged under six and on three measures of neighbourhood status, over a period of eight years. We find that spatial accessibility is highest in neighbourhoods with the highest socio-economic status, that such inequality has increased over time and that both effects can be attributed to the role of non-profits. The results indicate that the policy change undertaken in Vienna towards increased communitarisation – that is, a shift towards non-profit provision – has undermined the universal character of the city’s childcare system.

The social services sector is among the fastest-growing industries, but it has gained little attention in the debate regarding firm growth. This article analyzes firm growth in relation to firm size using payroll expenses as our indicator for both firm growth and firm size. We apply structural equation modeling and full maximum likelihood estimation using Austrian data comprising all non-profit social service providers. After 2013, fewer firms have been entering and more have been exiting the sector; however, we find that growing in size is still not associated with higher growth rates. Our study emphasizes the role of small organizations in remaining a growth sector.

We analyze the relationship between residence in an ethnic enclave and immigrants' labor market integration with respect to finding a first job in the receiving country. The analysis distinguishes ...

In this article, we propose an innovative way of delineating local markets based on easily accessible data. We apply this concept to the day care industry and investigate providers' location choices relative to local market characteristics to evaluate the widespread presumption that local markets for child care services are geographically very small. Using a panel of all day care centers for the metropolitan region of Vienna, Austria, for nearly a decade, as well as geographically extremely disaggregated data on the spatial distribution of children under the age of six at the 250 m × 250 m grid cell level, we find that the location of children and day care centers are strongly related, but this relationship diminishes as soon as the distance between a child's place of residence and the day care center's location increases. We conclude that local markets for day care services in metropolitan regions are indeed very small (about 500 m or 550 yards).

This paper estimates a theory-guided gravity equation of regional patient flows. In our model, a patient’s choice to consult a physician in a particular region depends on a measure of spatial accessibility that accounts for the exact locations of both patients and physicians. Introducing this concept in a spatial economics model, we derive an augmented gravity-type equation and show that our measure of accessibility performs better in explaining patient flows than bilateral distance. We conduct a rich set of counterfactual simulations, illustrating that the effects of physicians’ market exits on patient mobility crucially depend on their exact locations.

How did the relation between Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and government develop during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, once governments had taken restrictive measures to lock down economic and public life? Austria is used as an example of a corporatist welfare state whereby collaboration between government and CSOs occurs particularly in the fields of social services, health-care, and youth. Our analysis focuses on the social service sector and differentiates between several social policy fields. We hereby analyze data from qualitative interviews with CEOs from 30 CSOs, four group discussions with another 30 representatives of CSOs, public agencies and authorities, and from a standardized questionnaire (n = 99 CSOs). We also utilize our own experiences as participant observers in meetings between CSOs and government. Results indicate that CSOs suffered financially partly due to a decrease in income, though mostly due to an increase in cost. In social services in particular, they also faced hardships caused by the need to reorganize operations and human resources, and by the increased demands of customers. Federal government took responsibility for supporting CSOs financially, though such support was hampered by unclear competencies in Austria’s multilayered federal system.

Interestingly, although many authors consent that nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector have grown in many countries, there is little discussion of how to best measure this growth. Looking at the broad universe of nonprofit organizations, there is no single measure that is relevant for the whole sector and captures changes adequately. This article gives an overview of commonly-used growth measures in the existing nonprofit literature and discusses the informative value of the various measures. Using Austrian and Scottish time-series data, we present an empirical example of how the growth story of the nonprofit sector can change depending on the measures used. The correlations between measures such as the number of organizations, income/expenditures, and assets are particularly small. We recommend that researchers measuring the growth of the nonprofit sector should be clear about the properties of their selected measure, and where possible should present alternative measures in their analysis.

Volunteers in nonprofit and public organizations can provide additional resources and exert positive influence on organizations, staff, and clients. However, the relationship between paid staff and volunteers is complex and may lead to tension, employee dissatisfaction, and, ultimately, workers leaving the organization. This article focuses on excessive worker turnover as a signal of delicate organizational health and analyzes whether volunteers are an important variable in explaining differences in excess turnover rates between organizations. Using Austrian survey data and applying Tobit regressions, we show that more volunteers in management tasks compared with volunteers employed in other tasks increase both the probability of experiencing excess worker turnover and the amount of excess turnover. This result is interpreted as a possible sign for volunteer–staff tension. Understanding the consequences of using volunteer labor for paid workers is important to prevent volunteering from backfiring on service capacity and quality in public and nonprofit organizations.

Previous research addressing the relation between income and donations as a proportion of income has revealed predominantly inconsistent results. In this article, we argue that this can partly be explained by the great variance of methodological approaches. Providing a literature review covering 26 studies, we systematically identify how methodological issues such as data, variables, and methods have affected former findings. In addition, we apply different methodological approaches to Austrian income tax data (n= 20,000), demonstrating how different methods lead to a variation in results. Overall, we show that existing studies are hardly comparable as their designs vary strongly. We point out that it is particularly important to use samples with sufficient cases of all income groups and methods that adequately account for the non-linear relation between the two variables, not restricting it to a U-shape. Our findings enable a better understanding and interpretation of diverging findings in philanthropic research.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, social service providers worldwide have reported funding cuts, while the need for some social services has been increasing. This paper examines the combined and longer-term effects of such divergent developments on the nonprofit social services sector. The empirical analysis uses Austrian administrative data on six subfields of the sector covering the years 2003–2017. We investigate significant changes in the trends of four growth indicators applying interrupted time series analysis. We find that the 2008 economic crisis is associated with persistently lower growth rates in Austria’s nonprofit social services sector. The magnitude of this dampening effect differs across subsectors. Additionally, our findings suggest an increase in market concentration. Hence, the study discloses a long-term scarring effect of the economic crisis on Austria’s social services sector, raising doubts on the sector’s future resilience.

This paper explores cross-country variations in charitable giving and investigates the association of welfare state policies with private philanthropy. Hypotheses are drawn from crowding-out theory and considerations about the influence of a country’s mixed economy of welfare. We add to the on-going discussion concerning the crowding-out hypothesis with empirical evidence by looking at specific charitable subsectors people donate to across countries. Using Eurobarometer survey data that include 23 countries, we find no evidence for a crowding-out effect, but rather a crosswise crowding-in effect of private donations. Moreover, giving behaviour differs between non-profit regimes.

This article investigates the influence of competition on price and product quality among Austrian camping sites, a market characterized by both horizontal (spatial) and vertical product differentiation. Theoretically, the effect of competition on quality is ambiguous and depends on the degree of cost substitutability between output and quality. Estimating a system of equations shows that intense competition has a positive impact on product quality and a negative effect on prices (conditional on quality). As high quality is associated with high prices, the total effect of competition on prices is rather small.

This article presents a novel method of market delineation, which generates virtually isolated residential clusters using data on the spatial distribution of the population. The performance of this approach is evaluated by contrasting it with traditional delineation techniques based on municipal boundaries. The estimation of simple entry models for five industries shows that markets defined using micro-level residence information perform better in terms of reducing cross-border spatial spillovers and predicting the equilibrium number of firms on the market more accurately. Additionally, the estimated entry threshold ratios using this method successfully reflect our expectations based on models consisting of geographically isolated markets, as well as ex-ante knowledge about the investigated industries.

This paper analyses the role of the spatial structure of migrant networks in the location decision of migrants to the European Union at the regional level. Using a random parameters logit specification, a significant positive effect of migrant networks in neighbouring regions on migrants’ location decisions is found. Although this spatial spillover effect is smaller than the effect of networks in the host regions, omitting to control for this spatial dependence results in a 40% overestimation of the effect of regional migrant networks on the location decision of newly arriving migrants. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2017.1380305

Pennerstorfer D. Export, migration and costs of trade: evidence from Central European firms, Regional Studies. This article analyses the link between immigration and trade at the firm level, utilizing information on the export activities of 8300 firms located in different Central European countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) for various export markets as well as regional data on immigration. The empirical analysis suggests a strong, economically meaningful and statistically significant impact of immigration on the export propensity (extensive margin), whereas the influence on firms' export volumes (intensive margin) is much smaller. This leads to the conclusion that immigrants promote export activities to their home countries mainly by reducing fixed costs of trade.

We empirically investigate the importance of centrality (holding a central position in a spatial network) for strategic interaction in pricing for the Austrian retail gasoline market. Results from spatial autoregressive models suggest that the gasoline station located most closely to the market center – defined as the 1-median location – exerts the strongest effect on pricing decisions of other stations. We conclude that centrality influences firms’ pricing behavior and further find that the importance of centrality increases with market size.