News consumers in many authoritarian countries read government-controlled sources even when independent sources are available. We test whether these choices reflect a preference for pro-government coverage versus persistent tastes for specific websites. We exploit textual data from news...

The paper aims at explaining empirically the diffusion of E-commerce based on two largescale sample surveys conducted in the Swiss economy. The paper adds to previous work in two ways: firstly, we estimate separate models for E-selling and E-purchasing, and, secondly, we distinguish between...

We apply different matched-pair methods to evaluate the policy of sustaining the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies by Swiss firms and we compare it in decomposing the selection bias. In this aim we present the evaluation problem, the decomposition of the selection bias and the...

We define annual shareholder meetings as contentious if one or more ballot items are likely to obtain sufficient shareholder votes to induce a firm to implement governance changes. Using a sample of almost 28,000 meetings between 2003 and 2012, we find that abnormal stock returns over the 40-day...

The paper aims at a joint analysis of inter-firm and intra-firm diffusion of technology, taking as an example E-selling and E-purchasing. The analysis is based on an encompassing model of diffusion, drawn from the literature, which is extended by considering technology-specific obstacles and...

This paper uses panel data of Swiss firms to analyze the impact of education level diversity in the workforce on innovation performance, addressing endogeneity by exploiting within firm variation as well as variation in labor supply across regions. We find that vertical educational diversity...

We review and condense the body of literature on the economic returns of public R&D on private R&D and find that: (i) private returns to R&D appear to be large and larger than the returns to alternative investments; (ii) private R&D and R&D subsidies are positively correlated and there is no...

The present paper estimates and decomposes the employment effect of innovation by R&D intensity levels. Our micro-econometric analysis is based on a large international panel data set from the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. Employing flexible semi-parametric methods - the generalised...