The paper studies the demand for foreign university graduates at the firm level. Using a unique dataset on recruitment policies of firms in four European countries, the determinants of demand for internationally mobile highly skilled employees are established. I investigate the number, origin,...

We examine the interplay of endogenous vertical integration and costreducing downstream investment in successive oligopoly. We start from a linear Cournot model to motivate our more general reducedform framework. For this general framework, we establish the following main results: First,...

Using a general two-stage framework, this paper gives sufficient conditions for increasing competition to have negative or positive effects on R&D-investment, respectively. Both possibilities arise in plausible situations, even if one uses relatively narrow definitions of increasing competition....

This paper examines the determinants of mergers and bankruptcies, using firm level data from the Swiss Business Census and the Dun & Bradstreet exit database for Switzerland (1995-2000). Employing duration analysis, we find considerable differences in the determinants of mergers and...

Using information on job changes and search behavior of workers and controlling for endogenous mobility we study firm-size wage differentials in Switzerland. We find that the observed cross-sectional firm size premium cannot be explained exclusively by worker heterogeneity. Almost 50 % of the...

A pervasive, yet little acknowledged feature of international migration to developed countries is that newly arriving immigrants are increasingly highly skilled. This paper analyses the factors affecting the change in the skill composition of immigrants in Switzerland between 1980 and 2010 using...

A pervasive, yet little acknowledged feature of international migration to developed countries is that newly arriving immigrants are increasingly highly skilled since the 1980s. This paper analyses the determinants of changes in the skill composition of immigrants using a framework suggested by...

We analyze the effects of the unprecedented rise in trade between Germany and “the East” – China and Eastern Europe – in the period 1988 – 2008 on German local labor markets. Using detailed administrative data, we exploit the cross-regional variation in initial industry structures and...

SBTC is a powerful mechanism in explaining the increasing gap between educated and uneducated wages. However, SBTC cannot mimic the US within-group wage inequality. This paper provides an explanation for the observed intra-college group inequality by showing that the top decile earners'...

The presence of workers who reciprocate higher wages with greater effort can have important consequences for labor markets. Knowledge about the determinants of reciprocal effort choices is, however, incomplete. We investigate the role of fairness perceptions and social preferences in workers’...