We estimate the causal effect of immigration on the labor market outcomes of resident employees in Switzerland, whose foreign labor force has increased by 32.8% in the last decade. To address endogeneity of immigration into different labor market cells, we develop new variants of the shift-share...

On the basis of keyword searches in newspaper articles several versions of the Recession-word Index (RWI) are constructed for Germany and Switzerland. We use these indices in order to track the business cycle dynamics in these two countries. Our main findings are the following. First, we show...

Bailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather...

This text presents the economic forecast conducted by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at the ETH Zurich as published on 26 March 2013. After an introduction describing the current situation and crucial assumptions underlying the forecast, we summarise the key results for Switzerland. Then we...

Nowadays, it is widely believed that greater disclosure and clarity over policy may lead to greater predictability of central bank actions. We examine whether communication by the European Central Bank (ECB) adds information compared to the information provided by a Taylor rule model in which...

The paper aims at explaining empirically the diffusion of E-commerce based on two largescale sample surveys conducted in the Swiss economy. The paper adds to previous work in two ways: firstly, we estimate separate models for E-selling and E-purchasing, and, secondly, we distinguish between...

This paper investigates empirically the impact of diversity on the innovation performance of a firm. We created a measure for diversity that mirrors differences in the resource base of firms within an industry and tested its impact on innovation in addition to more traditional factors like...

We examine whether and under which circumstances World Bank projects and IMF programs affect the likelihood of major government crises. Using a sample of more than 90 developing countries over the period 1970-2002, we find that crises are on average more likely as a consequence of Bank and Fund...

This paper investigates the effects of media coverage and macroeconomic con- ditions on inflation forecast disagreement of German households and professional forecasters. We adopt a Bayesian learning model in which media coverage of infla- tion affects forecast disagreement by influencing...

This paper investigates the technological orientation of firms and universities and their propensity to have knowledge and technology transfer (KTT) activities. This study looks at the technological potential for KTT and how it is used, emphasizing differences between smaller and larger firms....