With the recent global economic and financial crisis, the governments throughout Europe have been closing, concentrating, restructuring or privatizing some public services and, at the same time, the number of services available in electronic platforms (e.g., by Internet or telephone) has been...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the cost efficiency of private and public property insurance providers in Switzerland. The most commonly used measure for this kind of exercise is the Claims / Premium ratio. We argue that this measure may give strongly biased results. We develop a simple...

This paper investigates the impact of modern information and communication technologies on the demand for heterogeneous labor. It starts with an interrelated factor demand system. The "desired" level of employment, which is needed in such models, is derived from a generalized Leontief cost...

How do lenders use their reputation when participating in syndicated loans? I address this question by focusing on syndicate composition with respect to participants' reputation and its impact on loan spreads. I find that lender reputation enables it to compete in terms of choosing the types of...

Dieses Papier beschäftigt sich mit dem Produktportfolio-Management (PPM) und seiner Rolle im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung. Während einige betonen, dass strategische, langfristige Planung und PPM in Zeiten kürzerer Produktlebenszyklen, digitaler Innovationen und disruptiver Geschäftsmodelle...

Germany’s manufacturing sector, which plays an important role for exports, has been performing well over the past decade in terms of labour productivity growth and international competitiveness. However, the services sector has had much slower growth rates. Competition often appears to be...

This paper introduces a model which identifies the economic activity of each local economy (location) and observes the time distance between each pair of locations as well as the average time distance between sub locations in each local economy. The study focuses on five categories of firms:...

This paper aims to contribute toa better understanding of the Knowledge Intensive Services spatial distribution across the European Union(EU) regions(NUTSII), linking recent research approaches on innovation and structural change with approaches to regional economics. As a means of conducting...

Although the manufacturing sector is known to have a unique role in structural transformation, the industries without smokestacks that include tradable services (e.g., IT, tourism, transport), horticulture, and agro-industry can provide new opportunities for export development in low-income...

The purpose of this paper is to propose a service development process that is adapted to manufacturing companies and to discuss its implication for companies with a focus on product development and product sales. This paper looks at new service development (NSD) literature and argues for design...