This paper is concerned with the study of the labor market performance of immigrants. The unemployment rate is used as an indicator and natives as the reference group for the analysis. The analysis proceeds in two steps. In a first step, probit regressions on the unemployment probabilities are...

Recent studies have shown that there are significant earnings differentials between immigrants and natives in Switzerland. The goal of this paper is to determine whether these differences can be attributed to diverging socio-economic endowments or to discrimination. We use the well-known...

Being closer to the poor, NGOs are widely believed to provide better targeted aid than state agencies. But empirical evidence is largely lacking. We contribute to closing this gap by drawing on an exceptionally detailed Swiss database that covers different forms of NGO aid and several official...

Recent studies found evidence for nominal wage rigidity during periods of relatively high nominal GDP growth. It has been argued, however, that in an environment with low nominal GDP growth, when nominal wage cuts become customary, workers' opposition to nominal cuts would erode and, hence,...

Comparing the emigration rates of countries at different stages of economic development, an inverse u-shape emerges. Although merely based on cross-sectional evidence, the “migration hump” is often treated as a causal relationship. Since the peak is located at rather high per capita incomes...

The question of whether aid recipient countries would benefit from stronger income effects if foreign donors provided higher quality aid has received scant attention so far. We make use of the ranking of donors by the Center for Global Development to compare the effects of quality-adjusted aid...

There is a startling gap between, allegedly, globalization-induced changes in international competition for foreign direct investment (FDI) and recent empirical evidence on the relative importance of determinants of FDI in developing countries. We show that surprisingly little has changed since...

Es wird häufig vermutet, dass sich die Bestimmungsgründe ausländischer Direktinvestitionen im Prozess der Globalisierung nachhaltig verändert haben. Diese These wird am Beispiel der deutschen Direktinvestitionen in Entwicklungs- und Reformländern korrelations- und regressionsanalytisch...

We raise the hypothesis that aid specifically targeted at economic infrastructure helps developing countries attract higher FDI inflows through improving their endowment with infrastructure in transportation, communication, energy and finance. By performing 3SLS estimations we explicitly account...