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Complementarities among Types of Education in Affecting Firms' Productivity
(2018)KOF Working PapersThis paper uses Swiss firm-level panel data to estimate how complementarities among workers with different types of education affect firms' productivity. We subdivide workers by education into four groups: no post-secondary education, upper secondary vocational education and training (VET), tertiary professional education, and tertiary academic education. To account for possible endogeneity, we exploit within-firm variation and employ a ...Working Paper -
Quantitative easing in the euro area and SMEs’ access to finance: Who benefits the most?
(2018)KOF Working PapersAfter the global financial crisis and during the European sovereign debt crisis, bank lending to companies in the euro area slowed down dramatically bringing the economy close to a credit crunch. It was only after the start of the ECB’s quantitative easing programme in early 2015 that bank lending improved sustainably. The study analyses the impact of the ECB’s Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) on the access to finance of small and ...Working Paper -
Extending classical surrogate modelling to ultrahigh dimensional problems through supervised dimensionality reduction: a data-driven approach
(2018)arXivThanks to their versatility, ease of deployment and high-performance, surrogate models have become staple tools in the arsenal of uncertainty quantification (UQ). From local interpolants to global spectral decompositions, surrogates are characterised by their ability to efficiently emulate complex computational models based on a small set of model runs used for training. An inherent limitation of many surrogate models is their susceptibility ...Working Paper -
Co-detection of micro seismic activity as early warning of gravitational slope failure
(2018)arXivWe developed a new strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction for gravitational slope failure: We propose a simple method for real-time early warning of gravity-driven failures that considers and exploits both the heterogeneity of natural media and characteristics of acoustic emissions attenuation. This method capitalizes on co-detection of elastic waves emanating from micro-cracks by a network of multiple and spatially distributed sensors. ...Working Paper -
Leveraging rust types for modular specification and verification
(2018)Rust’s type system ensures memory safety: well-typed Rust programs are guaranteed to not exhibit problems such as dangling pointers, data races, and unexpected side effects through aliased references. Going beyond memory safety, for instance, to guarantee the absence of assertion failures or functional correctness, requires static program verification. Formal verification of system software is notoriously difficult and requires complex ...Working Paper -
Addressing religion in conflict: Insights and case studies from Myanmar
(2018)CSS Mediation ResourcesPeaceful coexistence between groups belonging to different religious traditions is under pressure in Myanmar today. Despite this, various peacebuilding initiatives aimed at addressing issues that involve interfaith or intercommunal relations and peaceful coexistence between religious communities in Myanmar exist. This article looks at what Myanmar and international peace practitioners and policy makers can learn from selected initiatives ...Report -
Born to be an Entrepreneur? How Cultural Origin Affects Entrepreneurship
(2018)KOF Working PapersPersistent differences in entrepreneurial activity between regions and countries remain unexplained. This paper argues that cultural heritage is an important determinant. We exploit a quasi-experimental setting comparing entrepreneurial activities of individuals with different cultural ancestry from within Switzerland but who live in the same municipality today and are hence exposed to the same economic and institutional environment. We ...Working Paper -
Vierter Trilateraler Workshop D-A-CH Schutz kritischer Infrastrukturen 4.-6. Juni 2018 in Bonn
(2018)CSS Risk and Resilience ReportsVom 4. bis zum 6. Juni 2018 trafen sich Behördenvertreterinnen und -vertreter aus den Bereichen Sicherheitspolitik und Bevölkerungsschutz zum vierten trilateralen Workshop D-A-CH Schutz Kritischer Infrastrukturen (SKI/KRITIS). Der diesjährige Workshop wurde durch das deutsche Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe (BBK) an dessen Amtssitz in Bonn organisiert und gemeinsam mit dem österreichischen Bundeskanzleramt, dem ...Report