Public utilities are typically endowed with the following characteristics that are likely to affect their performance: (1) no competitors, (2) political pressures and regulation, (3) soft budget constraints. This paper explores the efficiency of such a utility, the Swiss telecommunication...

The Geneva and Zurich housing markets are characterised by high proportions of foreigners and a large share of rental housing. This provides ideal conditions for testing whether foreigners pay more for the same quality of housing than Swiss households and whether flats in neighbourhoods with...

On June 27–30, 2007, we organized at the Geneva School of Business Administration an International Symposium entitled "Hedonic Methods in Real Estate". During the first day, called the "Swiss hedonic day", Swiss researchers from universities, consulting firms and banks discussed the models...

The conventional housing affordability index compares rents paid to incomes. It is a noisy statistic both for the general cost of housing and for the cost of appropriate housing for individual households. Noise comes from rent differentials between comparable units that are due to rent-control...

The proportion of Swiss households that own their home has always been in the vicinity of 30 percent, the lowest proportion in the OECD. Clearly the existing, essentially federal, policy for promoting home ownership has not been very aggressive. A survey allows us to understand what households...

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