Journal: KOF Working Papers

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KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich

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Publications 1 - 10 of 479
  • The Impact of Venture Capital on the Persistence of Innovation Activities of Swiss Start-ups
    Item type: Working Paper
    Arvanitis, Spyros; Stucki, Tobias (2013)
    KOF Working Papers
    In this study we investigate the impact of early stage venture capital on innovation activities of Swiss start-ups. This is done based on a cohort of start-ups that is representative of all firms founded in Switzerland in 1996/97 as recorded by a census of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office for this period. We analyze not only the impact of early stage venture capital on innovation performance 3 years after firm foundation but also 6 and 9 years after firm start, respectively, for those firms that survived so long and reported continuously innovation activities (persistence of innovation). The results support neither the hypothesis of a positive impact on initial innovation activities nor the hypothesis of a positive time-persistent effect on innovation performance of start-ups.
  • Business tendency surveys and macroeconomic fluctuations
    Item type: Working Paper
    Kaufmann, Daniel; Scheufele, Rolf (2015)
    KOF Working Papers
    We investigate the information content of business tendency surveys for key macroeconomic variables in Switzerland. To summarise the information of a large data set of sectoral business tendency surveys we extract a small number of common factors by a principal components estimator. The estimator is able to deal with mixed-frequency data and missing observations at the beginning and end of the sample period. We show that these survey-based factors explain a relevant share of the movements of key macroeconomic variables, i.e., CPI inflation, GDP, employment, and an output gap. In particular, questions about the current and future expected situation are informative. However, backward-looking questions, for example questions about the situation compared to the previous year, do not contain additional information. We then examine the economic dimension of the data set. Questions about prices, real activity and capacity constraints contain important information for the corresponding macroeconomic variables. Finally, we estimate a dynamic relationship to produce forecasts for our factors and these key macroeconomic variables. It turns out that the predictive ability of our survey-based factor approach is quite encouraging. In a pseudo out-of-sample exercise, our approach beats relevant benchmarks for forecasting CPI inflation and an output gap and adds information to the benchmark forecasts for GDP and employment.
  • Hidden Protectionism? Evidence from Non-tariff Barriers to Trade in the United States
    Item type: Working Paper
    Moser, Christoph; Grundke, Robert (2014)
    KOF Working Papers
    Are product standards protectionism in disguise? This paper estimates the costs of non- compliance with U.S. product standards, using a new database on U.S. import refusals from 2002 to 2012. We find that import refusals significantly decrease exports to the United States. This trade reducing effect is driven by developing countries and by refusals without any product sample analysis, in particular during the Subprime Crisis and its aftermath. This empirical result is consistent with (but does not prove) the existence of counter-cyclical, hidden protectionism due to non-tariff barriers to trade in the United States.
  • Does India Use Development Finance to Compete With China? A Subnational Analysis
    Item type: Working Paper
    Asmus, Gerda; Eichenauer, Vera; Fuchs, Andreas; et al. (2022)
    KOF Working Papers
    China and India increasingly provide aid and credit to developing countries. This paper explores whether India uses these financial instruments to compete for geopolitical and commercial influence with China (and vice versa). To do so, we build a new geocoded dataset of Indian government-financed projects in the Global South between 2007 and 2014 and combine it with data on Chinese government-financed projects. Our regression results for 2,333 provinces within 123 countries demonstrate that India’s Exim Bank is significantly more likely to locate a project in a given jurisdiction if China provided government financing there in the previous year. Since this effect is more pronounced in countries where India is more popular relative to China and where both lenders have a similar export structure, we interpret this as evidence of India competing with China. By contrast, we do not find evidence that China uses official aid or credit to compete with India through co-located projects.
  • Microeconometric Approaches to the Evaluation of RTD Policies: A Non-technical Summary of the State of the Art
    Item type: Working Paper
    Arvanitis, Spyros (2002)
    KOF Working Papers
  • University-Industry Knowledge Interaction in Switzerland: What University Scientists Think about Co-operation with Private Enterprises
    Item type: Working Paper
    Arvanitis, Spyridon; Kubli, Ursina; Wörter, Martin (2006)
    KOF Working Papers
    This study explores the factors determining the propensity of Swiss science institutions at the level of a single institute or department to interact with private enterprises in Switzerland (universities and other research institution), i.e. to get involved in knowledge and technology transfer (KTT) activities in order to provide firms with scientific knowledge in research fields which are relevant for their own innovation activities, collect practical experience for students and university staff as well as test the applicability of new research results. We are especially interested in the different forms of this interaction, not only through joint research projects but also through training, mobility of academic personnel, jointly supervised master theses and PhDs, consulting and so on. Moreover, we also study the determinants of commercialization of university research output that takes the form of patenting, licensing or spin-offs. The data used in this study were collected in the course of a survey among institutes of all three types of science institutions in Switzerland (federal institutions, cantonalal universities and regional universities of applied sciences) using a questionnaire.
  • Do forecasters inform or reassure?
    Item type: Working Paper
    Kholodilin, Konstantin A.; Siliverstovs, Boriss (2009)
    KOF Working Papers
    The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/ revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private consumption data are the most reliable. In addition, early forecasts of GDP, private consumption, and investment growth rates are shown to be systematically upward biased. Finally, early forecasts of all the variables seem to be no more accurate than na¨ıve forecasts based on the historical mean of the final data.
  • Improving the reliability of real-time Hodrick-Prescott Filtering using survey forecasts
    Item type: Working Paper
    Galimberti, Jaqueson K.; Moura, Marcelo L. (2014)
    KOF Working Papers
    Measuring economic activity in real-time is a crucial issue in applied research and in the decision-making process of policy makers; however, it also poses intricate challenges to statistical filtering methods that are built to operate optimally under the auspices of an infinite number of observations. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the use of survey forecasts to augment one of those methods, namely the largely used Hodrick-Prescott filter so as to attenuate the end-of-sample uncertainty observed in the resulting gap estimates. We find that this approach achieves powerful improvements to the real-time reliability of these economic activity measures, and we argue that the use of surveys is preferable relative to model-based forecasts due to both an usually superior accuracy in predicting current and future states of the economy and its parsimony.
  • Training Propensity of Start-ups in Switzerland – A Study Based on Data for the Start-up Cohort 1996-97
    Item type: Working Paper
    Arvanitis, Spyridon; Stucki, Tobias (2008)
    KOF Working Papers
    This study is based on data a cohort of Swiss firms that were founded in 1996/97. In the year 2000 data were collected by means of a postal survey among those firms, which still existed by that time. In 2003 and 2006 two further surveys were conducted among the participants of the respective last study. In this study we analyzed, firstly, the determinants of the propensity to train apprentices of new firms and how they change with increasing firm age. Secondly, we investigated how a firm’s training propensity correlated with its labour productivity. To this end, we specified an equation for training propensity and an equation for labour productivity, which included as an additional production factor the endogenized propensity to train apprentices.
  • Metropolitan Structures
    Item type: Working Paper
    Loumeau, Gabriel (2020)
    KOF Working Papers
    How does the structure of metropolitan areas a ect urbanization and welfare? Using the development of urban sub-centers in France in the 1970s, I study the short- and long-term e ects of urban structural changes. To retrieve within metropolitan area e ects, I exploit the fact that out of 11 planned subcenters, only 9 have actually been developed. Using local population data between 1926 and 2015, I observe a polarization of growth in favor of sub-centers. As local gains might be o set by losses elsewhere, I develop a general equilibrium model to investigate global e ects. Overall, the observed shift towards polycentric metropolitan structures leads to an increased urbanization (by about 900,000 inhabitants in 2015) and a 0.7% national welfare growth.
Publications 1 - 10 of 479