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...

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where in the...

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where in the...

This paper provides novel evidence on the role of income taxes for residential rents and spatial sorting. Drawing on comprehensive apartment-level data, we identify the eff ects of tax diff erentials across municipal boundaries in Switzerland. The boundary discontinuity design (BDD) corrects for...

The discussion about the long-run evolution of labor productivity in Switzerland is flawed because the available data on the input of labor is incoherent and incomplete. It is the aim of this paper to establish a consistent aggregate series of total hours worked covering 1950-2010. The new data...

From a theoretical perspective, the output gap is probably the most comprehensive and convincing concept to describe the cyclical position of an economy. Unfortunately, for practical purposes, the concept depends on the determination of potential output, which is an inherently unobservable...

Am 24. November 2013 stimmen die Schweizer Stimmbürgerinnen und Stimmbürger über die Volksinitiative "1:12 - Für gerechte Löhne" ab. Dieser Bericht leistet insbesondere empirische Grundlagenarbeit und analysiert die tatsächliche Lohnspanne in Schweizer Unternehmen mithilfe der Daten der...