In the present paper, we analyse the role of demand factors on wages and hours in Switzerland. To accomplish this task, we used the 1996 Swiss Wage Structure Survey, a large employee-employer survey. Results indicate that capital intensity appears to have a certain impact on the relation between...

Due to high unemployment rates since the mid 70s, there is a controversial political debate in Europe on the effects of substituting employment for working hours. Does a shorter working week reduce unemployment rates? Whereas this question has been a point of discussion in many Western European...

Despite a long recession and technological progress, wage inequality has increased very little in Switzerland during the period 1992-1997. But this not very spectacular development hides some more important changes concerning some specific categories of workers. The present analysis tries to...

This paper measures the differences in earnings distributions between public sector and private sector employees, based on data from the wage structure survey of 1996. We .first use quantile regressions to account for possible different wage premiums at various point of the distributions along...

This paper explores the impact of import competition on wage and employment at the industry level in Switzerland. We estimated reduced-form wage and employment equations for a panel of seven Swiss manufacturing sectors. Our analysis relies on a basic partial equilibrium relationship that relates...

This paper reports the results of an experiment on the intertemporal model of consumer behavior with perfect foresight. A test using the theory of revealed preference show that a significant number of individuals have an inconsistent behavior. However, the average data are consistent with the...

In this paper threshold autoregressive and momentum threshold autoregressive cointegration models are used to investigate buffer stock behavior of German M3 money demand during the period from 1975:1 to 1997:4. These cointegration techniques allow to model deviations of actual money demand from...

The econometric analysis of government bonds prices reveals new historical insights and can therefore support the research activities of historians. In his comments on our article "Krieg und Finanzmarkt", which deals with this topic, JEAN-CHRISTIAN LAMBELET raises many important points. Our...

This paper examines the contribution of economics to the analysis of social policy. How can economic analysis help us understand and design the welfare state? I seek to answer this question with reference to social transfers in OECD countries. I focus in particular on the relation between social...

This study uses univariate and bivariate regime-switching models to compare the predictive performance of five popular business cycle indicators. The empirical results suggest that all considered series are sensibly modelled as following a two-state regimeswitching process. For each variable one...