Recent work in international economics provides insights into the measurement of product variety change - i.e., the change at the extensive margin of trade - and its consequences for a country's welfare. In such work, the measurement of product variety change is typically taken as given. There...

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...

This paper analyses how exchange rate shocks are transmitted at the firm level and establishes a nexus to firm-level export activity. Using precise survey data from a sample of Swiss firms, I find that an appreciation increases the probability of a decrease in firm-level costs, prices and...

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...

Angesichts der massiven Aufwertung des Schweizerfrankens im letzten Jahr stellt sich die Frage nach den Konsequenzen für die Entwicklung der Exporte. Bei der Untersuchung dieser Problematik berücksichtigen wir, dass sich Wechselkursschwankungen je nach Branche unterschiedlich auswirken...

This paper assesses the role of a larger degree of common language use between the populations of two countries on the so-called extensive product margin of trade. We focus on the overlap of products exported or imported between any pair of countries. The results suggest that the effect of...

Gravity models of international trade have been frequently applied to estimate the impact of common (official or spoken) language on bilateral trade. This study provides a meta-analysis based on 701 language effects collected from 81 academic articles. On average, a common (official or spoken)...

Entrepreneurial activity differs substantially across countries. While cultural differences across countries have often been proposed as an explanation, measuring a country's cultural characteristics suffers from various problems. This paper offers new evidence on the relative importance of...

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 effects of tax differentials across municipal boundaries in Switzerland. The boundary discontinuity design (BDD) corrects for...

This paper studies the effect of sharing a common native language on international trade. Switzerland hosts three major native language groups which adjoin countries sharing the same native majority languages. In regions close to the internal language border the alternate major language is...