infonet-economy

Existing work on the effects of electoral reforms suggests that decreasing the costs of voting may exacerbate rather than reduce representational biases in turnout. We argue that some electoral institutions may have more uniform mobilization effects than previously thought and exploit the sequential introduction of postal voting in Switzerland to analyze how an exogenous decrease in…

Eine gesunde Schwangerschaft und frühkindliche Interventionen verringern ökonomische Ungleichheit. Wie, erklärt der Ökonom Hannes Schwandt, der von Princeton an die Uni Zürich gewechselt ist.

We investigate the dynamic effects of interregional labor market integration on migration flows, capital formation, and the price for housing services. The co-evolution of these variables depends on initial conditions at the time of labor market integration. In an initially capital-poor economy, there may be a reversal of migration flows during the transition to the steady state,…

What is the added value of a security which qualifies as a "high-quality liquid asset" (HQLA) under the Basel III "Liquidity Coverage Ratio" (LCR)? In this paper, we quantify the added value in terms of yield changes and, as suggested by Stein (2013), call it HQLA premium. To do so, we exploit the introduction of the LCR in Switzerland as a unique quasi-natural experiment and we find…

The global Great Recession has sparked renewed interest in the relationships between financial conditions and real activity. This paper considers the Swiss experience, studying the impact of credit market conditions and housing prices on real activity over the last three decades through the lens of a medium-scale structural Bayesian vector autoregressive model (BVAR). From a…

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the network characteristics of two interrelated interbank money markets and their impact on overall market conditions. Based on transaction data from the unsecured and secured Swiss franc money markets, the trading network structures are assessed before, during and after the financial market crisis. It can be shown that banks in the…

Few would dispute that sovereign defaults entail significant economic costs, including, most notably, important output losses. However, most of the evidence supporting this conventional wisdom, based on annual observations, suffers from serious measurement and identification problems. To address these drawbacks, we examine the impact of default on growth by looking at quarterly data…

This dissertation focuses on the barriers that authenticity brings to entrepreneurial outcomes such as entry of new organizations, product diversification, and introduction of new products in traditional industries. Advancing theory on organizational authenticity and geographical communities, this thesis argues that authenticity is not only an asset that organizations can choose…