The growing importance of services has led to significant structural change in advancedeconomies, with the service sector now accounting for the largest share of employment indeveloped countries. In his seminal model of the so-called cost disease of services, WilliamBaumol noted that the prices...

Hartwig (2008) has presented empirical evidence that the difference between real wage growth and productivity growth at the macroeconomic level is a robust explanatory variable for deflated health-care expenditure growth in OECD countries. In this paper, we test whether this finding is robust to...

I investigate whether demand growth and productivity growth in Switzerland have benefitted from the wage moderation that set in at the beginning of the 1990s in this country. The results suggest that the Swiss demand regime is profit-led while the productivity regime is wage-led. This means on...

Der Stabilitäts- und Wachstumspakt (SWP) steht nicht erst in der Kritik, seit immer mehr Länder Schwierigkeiten haben, seine Vorgaben zu erfüllen. Dennoch müssen Länder, die eine Währungsunion bilden, ein Interesse daran haben, ihr Finanzgebaren gegenseitig zu kontrollieren, da die...

Okun's Law postulates a stable relationship between quarterly output growth and changes in (un)employment. This proposition has so far been tested with macroeconomic data at the highest level of aggregation. The paper goes beyond that in extending the analysis to industry data from Switzerland,...

Keynes's essay "Relative Movements of Real Wages and Output" is widely believed to be an important amendment to his General Theory because, in this essay, Keynes relaxed his core assumption of decreasing marginal returns to labour. Non-decreasing marginal returns, however, do not sit comfortably...

The paper combines Baumol's model of structural change with a model of aggregate demand growth in the Keynesian-Kaleckian tradition to predict the dynamics of aggregate employment. The model for the demand regime is estimated with - and Baumol's model for the productivity regime is calibrated on...

The Bhaduri-Marglin model is a post-Kaleckian model that allows for studying the impact of functional income distribution on the growth in demand. Over recent years, a number of empirical studies based on this model have aimed at determining whether a redistribution towards profits harms or...

Die Gesundheitsausgaben in der Schweiz wachsen auch in diesem und nächsten Jahr schneller als die Gesamtwirtschaft. Dies ist das Ergebnis der halbjährlichen Gesundheitsausgabenprognose der KOF, die sie mit einem Forschungsbeitrag von TopPharm erstellt hat. Die KOF erwartet Wachstumsraten der...

Nach einem Unterbruch von drei Jahren nimmt die KOF Konjunkturforschungsstelle der ETH Zürich ihre halbjährlichen Prognosen der schweizerischen Gesundheitsausgaben wieder auf. Die Prognosetätigkeit wird im Herbst unterstützt durch einen Forschungsbeitrag von Comparis (www.comparis.ch) und im...