This paper investigates how recent immigration inflows from 2002 to 2008 have affected wages in Switzerland. This period is of particular interest as it marks the time during which the bilateral agreement with the EU on the free cross-border movement of workers has been effective. Since...

How large are the economies of scale of living together? And how do partners share their resources? The first question is usually answered by equivalence scales. Traditional estimation and application of equivalence scales assumes equal sharing of income within the household. This paper uses...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens? approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that ?women and men shall...

According to the classical human capital theory general training is entirely financed by workers. This prediction is at odds with the empirical evidence. This observation inspired new theoretical models of training in frictional labour market. These frictions create incentives for firms to...

Work-related training is considered to be very important for providing the workforce with the necessary skills for maintaining and enhancing the competitiveness of the firms and the economy. On the individual level, the primary effect of training should be an increased productivity of the...

Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens? approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that ?women and men shall...

In the second part of the 1990?s Switzerland conducted an ambitious active labour market policy (ALMP) encompassing a wide variety of programmes. We evaluate the effects of these programmes on the individual employment probability of potential participants. Our econometric analysis uses...

Social norms are usually neglected in economics, because they are to a large extent enforced through non-market interactions and difficult to isolate empirically. In this paper, we offer a direct measure of the social norm to work and we show that this norm has important economic effects. The...

Subsidised employment is an important tool of active labour market policies to improve the chances of the unemployed to find permanent employment. Using informative individual administrative data we investigate the effects of two different schemes of subsidised temporary employment implemented...

Income support for working low income families (the ?working poor?) is on top of the political agenda in Switzerland. The current social assistance system is considered inadequate to support working poor households. Labour unions propose the introduction of a general minimum wage, whereas the...