Atypical employment contracts are either considered as traps that hinder permanent employment in the primary segment of the labour market or as stepping-stones leading to stable employment. Whereas the former interpretation appears to apply to Germany, our analysis of on-call contracts in the...

This paper analyses the potential employment effects of foreign direct investment in the Swiss services industry. First, the theoretical analysis considers the consequences on domestic employment resulting from the specific characteristics of services compared with those of industrial goods. It...

One of the striking phenomena in recent stock market history is the continuous rise in stock prices. Classical explanations for this phenomenon have argued that these apparently high valuations are either caused by measurement error in accounting data, or by high expected future growth in...

In this paper, the item nonresponse problem associated with wage data collected by telephone surveys is analysed. Using data from the 1998 Swiss Labour Force Survey (SLFS) and data on interviewers, it is shown that the response decision can only partially be explained by the chracteristics of...