Articles

How to Explain the High Prices in Switzerland?

This article challenges the view that a lack of competition and a high level of regulations are the main causes of Switzerland’s high prices. First, we point out a number of stylized facts which are inconsiste...

Authors: Christoph Sax and Rolf Weder

Adjustment Dynamics of Bilateral Trade Flows: Theory and Evidence

In this paper, I introduce a trade-promoting ‘invisible asset’ into the standard Krugman (1980) model of international trade. It can be interpreted as trust that accumulates as an externality in proportion to suc...

Authors: Benjamin Jung

Taste Heterogeneity, Trade, and the Within-Industry Home Market Effect

Authors: Raphael Auer

Interest rate setting on the Swiss Franc repo market

Repurchase agreements (repos) are secured money market transactions. The cash taker provides collateral in the form of securities and in return receives money from the cash provider. To ensure the continuous c...

Authors: Sébastien Kraenzlin

Price-setting behaviour in Switzerland: Evidence from CPI micro data

This paper investigates price-setting behaviour of firms based on the individual price quotes underlying the Swiss consumer price index. The data set covers the years from 1993 to 2005. Six main findings emerg...

Authors: Daniel Kaufmann

The up-coming crisis and the banking sector in the Baltic States

Authors: Mejra Festić, Sebastijan Repina and Alenka Kavkler

Targeting labour market programmes — results from a randomized experiment

We evaluate a randomized experiment of a statistical support system developed to assist caseworkers in Swiss employment offices in choosing appropriate active labour market programmes for their unemployed clie...

Authors: Stefanie Behncke, Markus Frölich and Michael Lechner

Estimating a Taylor Rule with Markov Switching Regimes for Switzerland

In this paper a Taylor rule including the exchange rate gap is estimated for Switzerland under the assumption that the parameters depend on two states governed by a Markov switching process. The estimates from...

Authors: Alexander Perruchoud

Regional per Capita-Income — The Importance of Region-Specific Production Factors

Endowment with infrastructure, human and cultural capital is highly significant for regional economic performance. After clustering the regions, this hypothesis is tested for Austrian, German and Swiss NUTS 3 ...

Authors: Dirk Fornahl, Axel Schaffer and Jochen Siegele

The Marginal Cost of Saving a Life in Health Care: Age, Gender and Regional Differences in Switzerland

This paper estimates the marginal cost of saving a life using age- and gender-specific health care expenditures and mortality rates of the 26 Swiss cantons for the period 1997 to 2006. It shows almost triple t...

Authors: Stefan Felder and Andreas Werblow

Retrospective Price Indices and Substitution Bias

The consumer price index (CPI) is usually computed as a fixed-weighted Laspeyres price index, with the weights updated at discrete intervals only. It is well known that the Laspeyres functional form entails a ...

Authors: W. Erwin Diewert, Marco Huwiler and Ulrich Kohli

Liberalizing the Swiss Meat Market with the EU: Welfare Effects and Impacts on Third Countries

This article analyzes the welfare effects of multilateral versus bilateral trade liberalization between Switzerland and the EU in the meat sector. A multi-market multi-region partial equilibrium model is used....

Authors: Isabelle Schluep Campo and Robert Jörin

Measuring Capital Stocks and Capital Services in Switzerland

This paper presents estimates of the aggregate net (wealth) capital stock and aggregate capital services for Switzerland. We derive these estimates in a consistent manner using the perpetual inventory method. ...

Authors: Barbara Rudolf and Mathias Zurlinden

Biased Estimation in a Simple Extension of a Standard Error Correction Model

This paper considers an expectations augmented version of the Engle and Granger (1987) error correction model and shows that standard inference about the adjustment coefficients can be severely biased. This bias ...

Authors: Christian Müller

The Performance of Actively and Passively Managed Swiss Equity Funds

Using a Switzerland-specific Carhart model, we study the risk-adjusted performance of actively and passively managed mutual funds investing in Swiss stocks from 1989 to 2007. We also compare the performance of...

Authors: Manuel Ammann and Michael Steiner

Do Foreigners Pay Higher Rents for the Same Quality of Housing in Geneva and Zurich?

The Geneva and Zurich housing markets are characterised by high proportions of foreigners and a large share of rental housing. This provides ideal conditions for testing whether foreigners pay more for the sam...

Authors: Andrea Baranzini, Caroline Schaerer, José V. Ramirez and Philippe Thalmann

Estimation of Hedonic Models Using a Multilevel Approach: An Application for the Swiss Rental Market

This paper is an empirical application of a hedonic model to determine rents in Switzerland. Unlike traditional hedonic models, we take account of the fact that data are clustered at different levels. The resu...

Authors: Dragana Djurdjevic, Christine Eugster and Ronny Haase

The Impact of Housing Market Segmentation between Tourists and Residents on the Hedonic Price for Landscape Quality

Market segmentation is an important issue when estimating the implicit price for an environmental amenity from a surrogate market like property. This paper tests the hypothesis of a segmentation of the housing...

Authors: Nils Soguel, Marc-Jean Martin and Alexandre Tangerini

Valuation of Environmental Goods in Profit and Non-Profit Housing Sectors: Evidence from the Rental Market in the City of Zurich

This paper analyses the impact of electromagnetic pollution, noise and air pollution on the rent level for the aggregated and disaggregated market in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. Although there is no concl...

Authors: Silvia Banfi, Massimo Filippini and Andrea Horehájová

Indirect Construction of Hedonic Price Indexes for Private Properties

This paper analyzes the construction of price indexes for condominiums and single family houses in Switzerland over the period 1985 to 2004 using the indirect method. We find, that the pooling of the data, i.e...

Authors: Stefan S. Fahrländer

Spatial Estimation of the Impact of Airport Noise on Residential Housing Prices

The paper applies spatial econometric techniques to measure the impact of airport noise on the price of single-family homes in the Zurich Airport area. We exploit a large database of geo-referenced noise measu...

Authors: Marco Salvi

Constant-Quality House Price Indexes for Switzerland

The measurement of house price movements is a vital topic from both academic and practical perspectives and hence has been the focus of much research. There is almost unanimous consensus in the literature that...

Authors: Steven C. Bourassa, Martin Hoesli, Donato Scognamiglio and Philippe Sormani

Introduction to this Volume: Applying Hedonics in the Swiss Housing Markets

Authors: Andrea Baranzini, José V. Ramirez, Caroline Schaerer and Philippe Thalmann

How Do the Determinants of Demand for GP Visits Respond to Higher Supply? An Analysis of Grouped Counts

Although there is a substantial literature on the determinants of demand for primary care, few studies have been able to examine how these determinants respond to higher supply. Some demand studies include sup...

Authors: Paulos Teckle and Matt Sutton

The Contribution of Managed Care to the Performance of Healthcare Systems — Evidence from Three Countries

This paper applies the five standard economic performance criteria to gauge the contribution of Managed Care (MC) to the performance of three healthcare systems, viz. Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland....

Authors: Johannes Schoder and Peter Zweifel

Regional Quantity, Productivity and Efficiency Measures of the Swiss Health Care System

In Switzerland, there are substantial cantonal differences in per capita cost of the mandatory health care system. The present paper breaks these differences down into price and quantity effects revealing both...

Authors: Reto Schleiniger

The Determinants of Health Care Utilization in Portugal: An Approach with Count Data Models

This work aims to identify the determinants of health care utilization in Portugal and to quantify their effects. A clear idea about this may help the policy debate on the delivery and organization of health s...

Authors: João Cotter Salvado

Personality, Job Satisfaction and Health — The Mediating Influence of Affectivity

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and subjective and objective measures of health of workers over 50 using the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) and cross-sectional data from the Survey ...

Authors: Justina A. V. Fischer and Alfonso Sousa-Poza

Economies of Scale and Efficiency Measurement in Switzerland’s Nursing Homes

This paper examines the cost efficiency in the nursing home industry, an issue of concern to Swiss policy makers because of the explosive growth of national expenditure on elderly care and the aging of the pop...

Authors: Mehdi Farsi, Massimo Filippini and Diego Lunati

What Drives Individual Health Expenditure in Switzerland?

The explanatory factors of individual healthcare consumption are studied by means of healthcare expenditures from the 2000–2005 Swiss Household Income and Expenditure Survey (SHIES). In order to tackle the iss...

Authors: Marcel Bilger and Jean-Paul Chaze

Health Shocks and the Hazard Rate of Early Retirement in the ECHP

In this paper we use discrete-time proportional hazard models with internationally comparable longitudinal data from the full eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to study the relations...

Authors: Ronald Hagan, Andrew M. Jones and Nigel Rice

Swiss DRGs: Patient Heterogeneity and Hospital Payments

In this paper, we analyze the prospective method of paying hospitals when the within-DRG variance is high. To avoid patients dumping, an outlier payment system is implemented. In the APDRG Swiss System, it con...

Authors: Michel Mougeot and Florence Naegelen

Consumer-Directed Health Care: Can Consumers Look After Themselves?

In health care systems today, including those of Switzerland and the United States, participants do not necessarily see the big picture of lifetime health costs and quality of life, and in many systems consume...

Authors: Daniel McFadden, Joachim Winter and Florian Heiss

The Evolution of Physician Density in Switzerland

Our paper investigates the geographical distribution of physicians across the Swiss cantons over the years 1960 to 2005. We use a physician location model relating physician growth in a canton related to (i) t...

Authors: Gabrielle Wanzenried and Sandra Nocera

Modeling Monetary Transmission in Switzerland with a Structural Cointegrated VAR Model

This paper examines the transmission of monetary policy in Switzerland using a structural cointegrated VAR model that includes real money, real output, a long and short-term interest rate, inflation, the excha...

Authors: Katrin Assenmacher-Wesche

Investment Performance of Swiss Pension Funds and Investment Foundations

We investigate the performance of domestic and international bond and equity portfolios of Swiss pension funds and investment foundations over the period of 1996 to 2006. Our sample consists of 73 pension fund...

Authors: Manuel Ammann and Andreas Zingg

Improving Models of Income Dynamics Using Cross-Section-Information

Based on a relative entropy approach, this paper proposes a method to estimate or update transition matrices using just cross-sectional observations at two points in time. The method is then applied to explain...

Authors: Robert Aebi, Klaus Neusser and Peter Steiner

To Wait or Not to Wait: Swiss EU-Membership as an Investment under Uncertainty

Why do some countries join the EU earlier than others, why do others wait? In order to address this question we apply the theory of investment under uncertainty (Dixit and Pindyck, 1994) to the decision on EU-mem...

Authors: Beat Spirig and Rolf Weder

Sustainability of Swiss Fiscal Policy

We examine whether Swiss federal fiscal policy was sustainable over the period from 1900 to 2002. We perform unit root and cointegration tests for federal revenues and expenditures, taking into account a struc...

Authors: Gebhard Kirchgässner and Silika Prohl

The Effect of Entry Regulation on Process Innovation in the Swiss Mail Industry

We develop an industry specific model of price competition with product differentiation to analyze the effect of entry regulation on process innovation in the Swiss mail industry. We consider the four most pro...

Authors: Helmut M. Dietl, Andreas Grütter, Martin Lutzenberger, Cátia Felisberto and Matthias Finger

Risk Factors for the Swiss Stock Market

The four risk factors controlling for the market, size, value, and momentum effect have become a state-of-the-art framework for various applications in financial markets research. However, previous work shows ...

Authors: Manuel Ammann and Michael Steiner

Insider Trading in the Swiss Stock Market

Authors: Andreas Zingg, Sebastian Lang and Daniela Wyttenbach

Swiss Monetary Targeting 1974–1996: The Role of Internal Policy Analysis

Authors: Georg Rich

Liberalization of the Swiss Letter Market and the Viability of Universal Service Obligations

Authors: Christian Jaag

Nothing Ventured — Nothing Gained? Empirical Evidence on Venture Capital Financing in Switzerland

Authors: Christian Hopp

Can Bank Supervisors Rely on Market Data? A Critical Assessment from a Swiss Perspective

Market data, such as bond spreads or equity price volatility, are a complementary source to bank supervisory information. In Switzerland, meaningful market data are available for a number of banks which consti...

Authors: Urs W. Birchler and Matteo Facchinetti

Multifunctional Agriculture and the Preservation of Environmental Benefits

We investigate environmental aspects of agriculture from a welfare economic perspective and show that efficiency prices of agricultural and forest land include important amenity and non-use values that exhibit...

Authors: Werner Hediger and Bernard Lehmann

A Two-Pillar Phillips Curve for Switzerland

Monetary aggregates have historically been important in Swiss monetary policy. The Swiss National Bank used money growth targets until 1999. The new policy framework introduced in 2000 focuses on an inflation ...

Authors: Petra Gerlach-Kristen

Traffic Accidents in Switzerland: How Hazardous Are “High Risk” Groups? An Analysis Based on Police Protocols

On January 1, 2005, Switzerland reduced the legal level of blood-alcohol concentration while driving from 0.8‰ to 0.5‰. This happend on basis of the assumption that more restrictive per mil levels increase roa...

Authors: Thomas Gautschi, Dominik Hangartner and Aline Bütikofer

Decomposition of the Gender Wage Gap Using Matching: An Application for Switzerland

In this paper, we investigate the gender wage differentials for Switzerland. Using micro data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey, we apply a matching method to decompose the wage gap in Switzerland. This nonpa...

Authors: Dragana Djurdjevic and Sergiy Radyakin