infonet-economy

We analyze the endogenous formation of R&D networks, where firms are active in different product markets and can benefit from R&D spillovers form collaborating firms within or across different industries. R&D spillovers help firms to introduce process innovations to lower their production costs. Product innovations introduce an escape-competition effect, through which…

What tariffs would countries impose if they did not have to fear any retaliation? What would occur if there was a complete breakdown of trade policy cooperation? What would be the outcome if countries engaged in fully efficient trade negotiations? And what would happen to trade policy cooperation if the world trading system had a different institutional design? While such questions…

The Swiss Treasury has used the sealed-bid, uniform-price auction format for allocating government bonds since 1980. In this study, we examine the authorities’ motivation for choosing the uniform-price auction. In addition, we describe how the institutional set-up evolved over time. It includes bidding requirements, class of bidders, pre-auction information, the bidding process, the…

We develop a framework for optimal taxation when agents can earn their income both in traditional activities, where private and social products coincide, and in rent-seeking activities, where private returns exceed social returns either because they involve the capture of pre-existing rents or because they reduce the returns to traditional work. We characterize Pareto optimal income…

The productive efficiency of a firm can be decomposed into two parts, one persistent and one transient. So far, most of the cost efficiency studies estimated frontier models that provide either the transient or the persistent part of productive efficiency. This distinction seems to be appealing also for regulators. During the last decades, public utilities such as water and…

When deciding between product alternatives, consumers have to compare the observed prices to their internal reference price to determine whether the offer is a good deal or not. For product innovations, for which no reference price has been established, it is unclear against which standard the observed price is compared. Despite extensive research on the use of reference prices,…

Inevitably, healthcare goes pervasive, yet its many potential future scenarios are still to be defined. We employ foresight techniques to define some of these scenarios, as relevant for the current and future state of healthcare in Geneva, Switzerland. We teach the methodology to undergraduate business administration students – potential e.g., managers and policymakers in the future…