This paper argues that economic competition and political contestability are two key determinants of the successful development of the Swiss economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We describe how Switzerland evolved from a relatively poor country with no natural resources and net...

This paper argues that economic competition and political contestability are two key determinants of the successful development of the Swiss economy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We describe how Switzerland evolved from a relatively poor country with no natural resources and net...

A transition from a centrally planned to a market economy implies a massive reallocation of resources requiring realignments in relative prices, which may have important distributional effects. This paper examines the extent to which income differentials have changed in countries where bold...

This paper examines how institutional conditions in transition economies compare with those in the rest of the world using various indicators of governance. The focus is on the countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union but, when possible, transition countries, in Asia...

Die Schweiz gilt weltweit als einer der wichtigsten Bankenplätze und wird regelmässig in einer Reihemit New York, London oder Frankfurt genannt. Eine genauere geographische Differenzierung hinsichtlichder verschiedenen schweizerischen Bankenplätze Basel1, Genf, Tessin und Zürich erfolgtdabei...

We examine whether 'pioneer' regions - early leaders in generating new ideas in emerging scientific fields - develop and maintain an innovation advantage in the same fields over time. Our analysis covers 24 disruptive technologies (e.g. AI, cloud computing) in thousands of OECD regions over 20...

Despite tremendous growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, the popular press has recently raised concerns that disruptive innovative activity is slowing. These dire prognoses were mainly driven by Park et al. (2023), a Nature publication that uses decades of data and...

Why do some countries join the EU earlier than others, why do others wait? In order to answer this question we apply the theory of investment under uncertainty (Dixit and Pindyck, 1994) to the decision on EU-membership. We develop a simplified model of two periods to study how the value of...