This paper analyzes the effect of public and private third-party funds on the effciency of departments of Swiss public research institutions. Estimating an output distance function assuming that labor is used to produce master students and scientific publications, we find no statistically...

This paper compares the determinants and the effects of innovation cooperation on innovation performance at firm level in five European countries: Belgium, Germany, Norway, Portugal and Switzerland. In a first step we analyse cooperation agreements with national and international partners and in...

This paper investigates the impact of energy policies on the export performance of firms. There has been a long policy debate on potentially negative impacts of cost-increasing energy policies on international competitiveness. We use firm-level data from three countries with similar industry...

On the basis of keyword searches in newspaper articles several versions of the Recession-word Index (RWI) are constructed for Germany and Switzerland. We use these indices in order to track the business cycle dynamics in these two countries. Our main findings are the following. First, we show...

We investigate the relation between Net Neutrality regulation and Internet fragmentation. We model a two-sided market, where Content Providers (CPs) and consumers interact through Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and CPs sell consumers' attention to advertisers. Under Net Neutrality, a...

We test whether intellectual property rights (IPRs) foster or hinder innovation by estimating IV structural equations for a large sample of Swiss firms. We find that better appropriability conditions at the industry level raise the number of competitors. However, conditional on the given...

This paper proposes a new approach to measuring changes in the social status of education programmes, a type of social status that the literature has greatly neglected so far. We focus on the dual Vocational Education and Training (dual VET) system in Switzerland, which has recently received...

A sudden change in monetary policy happened in Switzerland on January 15th, 2015. The Swiss National Bank removed a lower exchange rate bound vis-à-vis the Euro. This unexpected change of regime induced a temporary uncertainty about future prices in foreign markets. We believe that this hampers...

While Switzerland's recent growth of employment was high in historical and international perspective, the reasons for this "job miracle" were not well understood. As the "miracle" was not anticipated by economic forecasters, it consequently resulted in systematic and persistent forecast errors....