Financial disasters to hedge funds, bank trading departments and individual speculative traders and investors seem to always occur because of non-diversification in all possible scenarios, being overbet and being hit by a bad scenario. Black swans are the worst type of bad scenario: unexpected...

Between 1999 and 2004 Switzerland opened its border region (BR) to cross-border workers (CBW), who are foreign residents commuting to Switzerland for work. In this paper, we exploit the timing of implementation and the fact that CBW commute almost exclusively to municipalities close to the...

Consumer prices in the Eurozone have just been announced: -0.6% for January 2015. In an effort to bring inflation back closer to the ECB's target level at just below 2%, EU Justice Court lawyers approved on January 14th 2015 a bond-buying program, which was announced a week later, January 22th...

This study examines the impact of the careful choice of the default on consumers' participation in the Smart Grid. In an online experiment in three countries, participants (N = 3802) were randomly assigned to three conditions, two of which (opt-in vs. opt-out) implied different defaults and the...

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...

There intimate connections between the 2007-9 financial crisis, ineffective regulation and the scandals that preceded that calamity, have led to rising demands for the re-evaluation and smarter coordination of the financial sector's governance, supervision and enforcement mechanisms with a view...

In light of the strong increase of house prices in Switzerland, we analyze the effects of mortgage rate shocks, changes in the interplay between housing demand and supply and GDP growth on house prices for the time period 1981-2014. We employ Bayesian time-varying coefficients vector...

This study investigates how being exposed to a field of study influences students' major choices. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university where all first-year students face largely the same curriculum before they choose a major. An important component of the first-year curriculum...

This study investigates how being exposed to a field of study influences students' major choices. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university where all first-year students face largely the same curriculum before they choose a major. An important component of the first-year curriculum...