In most developed countries drugs are dispensed to patients through physicians and pharmacists. This paper studies the effects of allowing doctors to directly dispense drugs to patients (self-dispensation) on pharmaceutical coverage. We use a Swiss dataset in our empirical analysis because...

Switzerland is famous for its vocational education and training (VET) system. This article describes Switzerland's success in integrating adolescents into the labour market, with emphasis on two aspects. First, dual-track VET, which combines learning at school and in host companies, is an...

Deductibles are commonly used to tame increasing health care costs. Numerous studies find that higher deductibles reduce health care utilization. In this paper we compare utilization in Switzerland between two health care plans with deductibles of 1,500 CHF and 2,500 CHF (1CHF = 1$) per calendar...

This paper uses Swiss firm-level panel data to estimate how complementarities among workers with different types of education affect firms' productivity. We subdivide workers by education into four groups: no post-secondary education, upper secondary vocational education and training (VET),...

Adaptive learning under constant-gain allows persistent deviations of beliefs from equilibrium so as to more realistically reflect agents' attempt of tracking the continuous evolution of the economy. A characterization of these beliefs is therefore paramount to a proper understanding of the role...

Social institutions are relatively stable patterns of behavior or joint action that help overcome fundamental problems and perform a function in society. The robustness of such institutions underlies their effectiveness at solving problems, but such robustness is difficult to assess. Building on...

Under adaptive learning, recursive algorithms are proposed to represent how agents update their beliefs over time. For applied purposes these algorithms require initial estimates of agents perceived law of motion. Obtaining appropriate initial estimates can become prohibitive within the usual...

In this paper we extend the targeted-regressor approach suggested in Bai and Ng (2008) for variables sampled at the same frequency to mixed-frequency data. Our MIDASSO approach is a combination of the unrestricted MIxed-frequency DAta-Sampling approach (U-MIDAS) (see Foroni et al., 2015; Castle et...