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Herbstprognose der schweizerischen Gesundheitsausgaben 2008–2011
(2009)KOF StudiesThe autumn forecast for Swiss health expenditure covers the years 2008 to 2011 (official data range to 2007). For the year 2008, the forecast assumes a higher-than-average growth in health expenditure. While a still solid growth is expected for the year 2009, a cooling down as a consequence of the recession is predicted for the years 2010 and 2011. The growth in the year 2010 is further slowed down by price cuts for pharmaceuticals.Report -
On the Relation Between Income Inequality and Happiness: Do Fairness Perceptions Matter?
(2009)KOF Working PapersIn this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived fairness will experience higher levels of life-time utility and are less in favor of income redistribution. In societies with a high level of actual ...Working Paper -
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Tax contracts and elections
(2009)Economics Working Paper SeriesIn this paper we examine the impact of tax contracts as a novel institution on elections, policies, and welfare. We consider a political game in which three parties compete to form the government. Parties have policy preferences about the level of public-good provision and benefit from perks when in office. A government raises taxes for both purposes. We show that tax contracts yield moderate policies and lead to lower perks by avoiding ...Working Paper -
How long do external capital constraints matter?
(2009)KOF Working PapersStart-ups mostly have only limited internal financing. Post-entry performance should thus strongly depend on the availability of new external capital. In this study we analyze the impact of financial constraints on the performance of Swiss start-ups. Since we use cohort data, we have for some start-ups data at different points in time. This allows us to analyze whether the effect of the availability of external capital on firm performance ...Working Paper -
From knowledge to added value
(2009)KOF Working PapersThe innovation value chain (IVC) divides the innovation process into three separate links or activities: knowledge gathering, knowledge transformation and knowledge exploitation. Here, we report a comparative panel data analysis of the IVC in Ireland and Switzerland. Both economies are small, very open and depend significantly on innovation to maintain competitive advantage. In recent years, however, R&D and innovation growth in Ireland ...Working Paper -
Do Competitively Acquired Funds Induce Public Research Institutions to Behave Efficiently?
(2009)KOF Working PapersThis paper analyzes the effect of public and private third-party funds on the efficiency of departments of Swiss public research institutions. Estimating an output distance function assuming that labor is used to produce master students and scientific publications, we find no statistically significant effect of private or public third-party funding on research efficiency. However, once we include technology transfer as an additional output, ...Working Paper -
Why the publication of socially harmful information may be socially desirable
(2009)Economics Working Paper SeriesWorking Paper -
Choice set generation from GPS data set for grocery shopping location choice modelling in canton Zurich
(2009)Arbeitsberichte Verkehrs- und RaumplanungThis paper describes a set of new procedures used to generate choice sets for grocery shop-ping destination choices observed in a large scale GPS data set. The procedures are a rule-based identification of the shopping trips, defining places from the observed locations using a hierarchical-clustering algorithm and finally a rule-based identification of the place of home and work/education and implicitly with this the imputation of the ...Working Paper -
Influences of in-cloud aerosol scavenging parameterizations on aerosol concentrations and wet deposition in ECHAM5-HAM
(2009)Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics DiscussionsA diagnostic nucleation scavenging scheme, which determines stratiform cloud scav-enging ratios for both aerosol mass and number distributions, based on cloud droplet,and ice crystal number concentrations, is introduced into the ECHAM5-HAM globalclimate model. This is coupled with a size-dependent in-cloud impaction scavenging parameterization for both cloud droplet-aerosol, and ice crystal-aerosol collisions. Sen-sitivity studies are ...Working Paper