Springer Science and Business Media LLC

The paper analyzes the relevance of the three constituent elements of the ‘new firm paradigm’, i.e. ICT, workplace organization and human capital, as determinants of a firm’s provision of training. We concentrate on apprenticeship training, which in German-speaking countries is a widespread practice of skill formation. Econometric studies dealing with a firm’s provision of apprenticeships so far did not pay much attention to the influence of a shift towards the new paradigm. We find that apprenticeship training is an appropriate way of skill formation in advanced economies, but this may not be the case in leading-edge segments of the economy.

This article explores the measurement of the production technology and efficiency of the performing arts sector. The stochastic frontier analysis has been used to estimate the technical efficiency scores for 20 Austrian and 30 Swiss non-profit theatres over 36 and 26 years, respectively. The number of visitors and tickets on offer are considered as two alternative measures of artistic output. The results indicate that individual efficiency estimates are very sensitive to the econometric specification of the unobserved heterogeneity of theatres. In particular, econometric techniques which do not account for this heterogeneity produce much lower efficiency levels. The indefinable dimension of artistic output such as theatre-specific quality may also have an important influence on efficiency estimates. The empirical analysis also delivers the first insights into the impact of exogenous factors on technical efficiency such as the number of theatres in the local area, regional differences and the level of public subsidies.

The partial shutdown of the economy following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of measurements of economic activity that are available with a short lag and at high frequency. The consumption of electricity turns out to be a valuable proxy, if it is corrected for influences from calendar and weather. Indeed, this proxy suggests that we are currently facing one of the deepest recessions ever.

We analyze drivers of the EUR/CHF exchange rate in different regimes between 2000 and 2020. Structural breaks between these subperiods are estimated in an integrated way together with the drivers that are relevant during these subperiods. Overall, the main drivers of the exchange rate include European equity and volatility indices, interest rate and term structure slope differentials, as well as monetary policy interventions. For the “peg period” September 2011–January 2015, in addition to the observed exchange rate we also analyze the drivers of the latent exchange rate that could have been observed in the absence of the peg. Interestingly, the SNB’s foreign currency investments became a significant driver of the EUR/CHF exchange rate only after the end of the peg period when there was no longer an officially communicated target rate.

Motivated by recent US evidence, we evaluate the predictive power of changes in the weight of large firms in the aggregate stock market (“Goliath vs David” (GVD)) for Swiss stock market returns and bond market returns. Previous research suggests that the asset return dynamics in the US and Switzerland differ markedly. Forecasting Swiss asset returns hence constitutes a challenging “out-of-sample” test for GVD. Over the sample period from January 1999 to December 2017, we find that the Swiss version of GVD exhibits predictive power for Swiss stock and bond market returns even in the presence of global predictors. However, Swiss bond market returns are best predicted by the US term spread.

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 nonparametric technique accounts for wage differences that can be due to differences in the supports. We can interpret these differences as a form of “discrimination” which is reflected in wages because women face “barriers” in accessing certain characteristics that men achieve. As a consequence, accounting for these differences in gender supports may be useful in terms of policy implications in promoting more equality between men and women.

This paper examines the effect of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the demand for workers in Switzerland. We compare the hypotheses that an increase in ICT leads to upskilling or job polarization and investigate their implications for countries where vocational education and training (VET) is the most widespread education program at the upper secondary level. Using data from a large employer–employee survey, we create a novel measure of ICT based on the percentage of ICT workers within firms. This measure allows us to assess the impact of ICT on the educational composition of the workforce by exploiting variation over time. We find that ICT has an upskilling effect from 1996 to 2018: ICT decreases the demand for low-skilled workers while increasing the demand for high-skilled workers, especially those with a tertiary vocational education. These results strongly suggest that VET is a valid alternative to a strictly academic education, because workers with a tertiary VET degree are as good, or better, at adjusting to technological change as workers with a tertiary academic education.