Refugees, and immigrants more generally, often do not have access to all jobs in the labor market. We argue that restrictions on employment opportunities help explain why immigrants have lower employment and wages than native citizens. To test this hypothesis, we leverage refugees' exogenous...

Does better access to foreign workers reduce firms' willingness to provide general skills training to unskilled workers? We analyze how the opening of the Swiss labor market to workers from the European Union affected the number of apprenticeship positions that firms provide. We exploit that the...

The discussion about the long-run evolution of labor productivity in Switzerland is flawed because the available data on the input of labor is incoherent and incomplete. It is the aim of this paper to establish a consistent aggregate series of total hours worked covering 1950-2010. The new data...

We evaluate nowcasts and one- to four-quarter-ahead forecasts of Swiss full time equivalent jobs from 1998-2011, comparing forecasts of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute and of the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs with the outcome of the reference series. Both forecasts are biased downward,...

We estimate the causal effect of immigration on the labor market outcomes of resident employees in Switzerland, whose foreign labor force has increased by 32.8% in the last decade. To address endogeneity of immigration into different labor market cells, we develop new variants of the shift-share...

We estimate the causal effect of immigration on unemployment, employment and wages of resident employees in Switzerland, whose foreign labor force has increased by 32.8% in the last ten years. To address endogeneity of immigration into different labor market cells, we develop new variants of the...

This paper is the first to study the factors determining labor's share of income on the level of the individual firm, employing an unusually informative panel data set. The empirical examination is concerned with Switzerland which stands out as one of the very few developed countries with a...

While Switzerland's recent growth of employment was high in historical and international perspective, the reasons for this "job miracle" were not well understood. As the "miracle" was not anticipated by economic forecasters, it consequently resulted in systematic and persistent forecast errors....

This paper examines the linkages between real exchange rate movements and firms' skill demand. Real exchange rate movements may affect unskilled workers differently than skilled workers because of skill-specific adjustment costs, or because exchange rates lead to changes in relative factor...

In Switzerland a sudden policy uncertainty shock happened in February 2014 with the close and largely unexpected acceptance of a referendum aiming at limiting free movement of persons. The referendum requires Switzerland to reintroduce annual quotas for immigrants within three years. The...