Springer Science and Business Media LLC

We examine the impact of transnational terrorism diffusion on security and international trade. To counter the diffusion of transnational terrorism, targeted governments implement security measures against countries where terror could potentially diffuse. Since security measures raise trade costs, we argue that countries, close enough to those from where terror originates, should experience negative spillovers on their trade. We find evidence for this hypothesis in our data. We show that the closer a country is to a source of terrorism, the higher the negative spillovers on its trade.

We analyse small businesses’ recourse to public support measures during the COVID-19 crisis using a survey of 1011 self-employed workers and small business owners in Switzerland. We find that “objective” measures of lockdown affectedness and economic structure explain fairly well how businesses availed of support measures to cover labour costs. Recourse to government-backed corona loans, however, appears to be driven to a larger extent by behavioural idiosyncrasies across firms. Specifically, previously indebted businesses took out corona loans more readily than those who had been debt-free before the pandemic. Since uptake is not well in line with firm fundamentals, we propose making loan repayments contingent on future profits. This will more effectively target and sustain businesses that are in trouble today but would be viable in the absence COVID-19.

This paper investigates how recent immigration inflows from 2002 to 2008 have affected wages in Switzerland. This period is of particular interest as it marks the time during which the bilateral agreement with the EU on the free cross-border movement of workers has been effective. Since different types of workers are likely to be unevenly affected by recent immigration inflows, we follow the “structural skill-cell approach” as for example employed by Borjas(2003) and Ottavianoand Peri(2008). This paper provides two main contributions. First, we estimate empirically the elasticities of substitution between different types of workers in Switzerland. Our results suggest that natives and immigrants are imperfect substitutes. Regarding different skill levels, the estimates indicate that workers are imperfect substitutes across broad education groups and across different experience groups. Second, the estimated elasticities of substitution are used to simulate the impact on domestic wages using the actual immigration inflows from 2002 to 2008. For the long run, the simulations produce some notable distributional consequences across different types of workers: While previous immigrants incur wage losses (−1.6%), native workers are not negatively affected on average (+0.4%). In the short run, immigration has a negative macroeconomic effect on the average wage, which, however, gradually dies out in the process of capital adjustment.

This paper provides empirical evidence on international price differences in ski lift tickets based on 214 ski areas in Austria, France, and Switzerland for the winter season 2010/2011. We find that French and Austrian one-day lift tickets (net of VAT) are an average of 17 and 7 per cent lower, respectively, than Swiss ticket prices after controlling for ski areas’ characteristics. The results of quantile regressions show that the magnitude of the international price differences is quite similar for low- and high-priced ski areas. Furthermore, price differences across countries do not increase with distance to the nearest border ski area.

In this paper we present the regional techno-economic model ETEM, designed for the analysis of regional energy/environment systems and we show how it can be used to explore the possible penetration of new technologies in a region corresponding roughly to the canton of Geneva. We investigate three scenarios with different constraints on CO₂ emissions and electricity imports and show the essential role played by new technologies, linked through a smart grid, in the effort toward a sustainable energy system. We strengthen our conclusion with a stochastic approach dealing with uncertainty in future electricity prices and electric car technology penetration.

This paper documents daily compound indicators on physical mobility and sales activity in Switzerland during the Corona crisis. We report several insights from these indicators: The Swiss population substantially reduced its activities already before the shops closed and before the authorities introduced containment policies in mid-March 2020. Activity started to gradually recover from the beginning of April onwards, again substantially before the first phase of the shutdown easing started at the end of April. Low physical mobility during the second half of March and during April likely contributed to the quick fall in new COVID-19 infections since mid-March. The sharp drop in economic activity in consumer-related services during March and April and the gradual recovery in these sectors since May correlate strongly with the reduction and subsequent gradual resurgence of mobility. In addition, while activity within Switzerland was back to normal levels by late June, activity of Swiss residents outside of Switzerland was still below normal.

Entitlements for social security and occupational pensions present a major wealth component and play a central role for financial security. However, most individual-level data lacks information on pension wealth. By linking various data sources, this contribution estimates the present value of future pension entitlements in Switzerland for statutory pensions, occupational pensions and third pillar accounts and analyses the distribution of augmented wealth, which combines pension wealth and net worth. The CH-SILC survey from 2015 is used to estimate real assets, financial assets and pension wealth of retired individuals. The pension entitlements of non-retired individuals are simulated on the basis of their earning history from administrative records following the accrual method and assuming a real discount rate of 2%. When pension wealth is added to net worth, average wealth doubles, and the Gini-coefficient declines by 26%. The equalising effect is particularly strong for social security pensions. The wealth distribution differs strongly between the three pillars of the pension system; there are also strong differences between gender and age groups. In Switzerland, wealth accumulation continues after retirement age.

Decisions on climate change and nuclear policies are likely to have major influences on the future evolution of the Swiss energy system. To understand the implications of selected future policy decisions, we analyse the development of the Swiss energy system with a bottom-up technology-rich least-cost optimisation modelling framework. We use the Swiss MARKAL energy system model and analyse a stringent climate change mitigation policy with two policy variants on the availability of nuclear energy, i.e. with and without nuclear new builds. The energy system modelling approach provides insights into system-wide energy pathways, technology choice and cross-sectoral trade-offs like resource competition, electrification, and CO₂ mitigation options across supply and demand sectors. To complement the full system approach, we apply an experimental TIMES model — a successor to MARKAL — of the Swiss electricity sector with a detailed representation of the electricity load curve accounting for diurnal and seasonal variations in demand and resource supply. The analytical results from both modelling approaches are presented and the electricity sector results compared to illustrate the complementary policy insights. The implications for realising an ambitious climate target with and without investment in new nuclear plants are discussed, and a number of areas for possible policy support identified.