This paper uses a panel data set of microfinance institutions (MFI) across the world to compare several identification strategies of cost efficiency and economies of scale. Concretely, we contrast the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and...

This paper analyzes the effect of public and private third-party funds on the efficiency 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 analyzes how apprenticeship training, i.e., work-based secondary education, affects personality traits compared to full-time school-based vocational or general education. Employing an instrumental variable approach that exploits the regional differences in the relative weight of...

This paper analyzes the impact of technological diversity on innovation inputs and success using Swiss firm-level panel data. While we do not find any impact of diversity on R&D intensity, we confirm a positive impact of diversity on patent applications as suggested by the literature. However,...

This paper analyzes the labor productivity of Swiss university departments between 1995 and 2007. Using a parametric input distance function we estimate and decompose the Malmquist productivity indexes in line with Fuentes et al. (2001) and Atkinson et al. (2003). By contrast to those studies,...

This paper provides first micro-level evidence of the global university production frontier, allowing to estimate technical efficiencies of 273 top research universities across 29 countries between 2007 and 2009. Exploiting comparable international data improves the estimation of the production...

This paper analyzes the relationship between competition and R&D cooperation with universities and competitors. Our simple model predicts that more competitors reduce the incentives for horizontal cooperation as it diminishes the gains from “collusion”. Assuming that the value of synergies...

The standard economy-wide indices of labor quality (or human capital) largely ignore the role of unobservable worker characteristics. In this paper, we develop a methodology for identifying the contri- butions of both observable and unobservable worker characteristics in the presence of the...

Analysing a comprehensive panel dataset of economists working at Austrian, German, and Swiss universities, we investigate how the local environment influences a scientist’s research productivity. The research environment varies if a scientist joins another department or if the characteristics...