Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics最新文献

Mobile applications hold promise to foster sustainable mobility behavior, but evaluations of their effectiveness are subject to a number of empirical challenges. We conduct a randomized controlled trial with three distinctive features: unobtrusive tracking of the control group, limited sample attrition, and a representative sample. In our study, 410 participants track their mobility behavior over a 5 week period. After 1 week, the treatment group engages with the user interface of the "Swiss Climate Challenge App". The user interface combines information on individual ${\text{CO}}_2$ emissions with gamification features. We find a treatment effect that implies a $9.8\%$ reduction in emissions caused by access to the mobile application. While we lack the statistical power to exclude a zero average effect, we find statistically significant emission reductions in the second half of the intervention period, among subjects in medium population density areas, and among men. Our findings suggest that mobile applications could generate considerable net benefits, but larger studies will be needed for validation.

Information friction makes it difficult for job seekers to find new employment opportunities. We propose a method for providing individual-specific occupation recommendations by ranking occupations based on their proximity to the worker's profile. We identify a set of twelve skills, abilities and work styles that capture the worker-oriented requirements of all occupations and discuss how to measure these items using online questions and tasks. We use the Euclidean distance between the measured items pertaining to a worker and the requirements of an occupation to measure the proximity between job seekers and occupations. We show that the proximity between job seekers' profiles and their preunemployment occupation predicts their intention to change occupations, thus suggesting that our method captures a meaningful conceptualization of mismatch. We also show that our method generates recommendations that differ from the previous occupations of mismatched job seekers, thereby potentially expanding their search scope.

Monitoring Consumption Switzerland is a public-private partnership between the University of St. Gallen and the payment companies Worldline and SIX that processes and publishes payment data on transactions in Switzerland processed by Wordline/SIX in real time. This paper provides background information on this novel source of data and presents their attributes, aggregation and granularity, and their interpretability. The paper presents several use cases that show the strengths of the data, and it alerts future users of the data to possible challenges. The paper also discusses the project's impact and provides an outlook.

We document whether a simple, univariate model for quarterly GDP growth is able to deliver forecasts of yearly GDP growth in a crisis period like the Covid-19 pandemic, which may serve cross-checking forecasts obtained from elaborate and expert models used by forecasting institutions. We include shocks to the log number of short-time workers as timely available current-quarter indicator. Yearly GDP growth forecasts serve cross-checking, in particular at the outbreak of the pandemic.

As was true for many others, my professional life was turned upside down in the early days of the pandemic. The crisis touched almost every field in economics: international supply chains broke down, economic activity was heavily constrained either by non-pharmaceutical measures to fight the pandemic or by voluntary action, and the labour market experienced unprecedented levels of short-time work and huge (temporary) lay-offs. Governments struggled to provide cash and find ways to compensate affected people and businesses. Financial markets tumbled and monetary policy faced new challenges on top of an already tense situation.

We study the interplay of non-pharmaceutical containment measures, human behavior, and the spread of COVID-19 in Switzerland. First, we collect sub-national data and construct indices that capture the stringency of containment measures at the cantonal level. Second, we use a vector autoregressive model to analyze feedback effects between our variables of interest via structural impulse responses. Our results suggest that increases in the stringency of containment measures lead to a significant reduction in weekly infections as well as debit card transactions, which serve as a proxy for behavioral changes in the population. Furthermore, analyzing different policy measures individually shows that business closures, recommendations to work from home, and restrictions on gatherings have been particularly effective in containing the spread of COVID-19 in Switzerland. Finally, our findings indicate a sizeable voluntary reduction in debit card transactions in response to a positive infection shock.

We study the impact of the pandemic on gender gaps in labor market outcomes in Switzerland. Using the Swiss Labor Force Survey data, we document a significant increase in the gender gap in labor market participation. We find no evidence of a worsening of the unemployment gender gap during the pandemic, but we find that women were more likely to uptake short-time work (STW). Unlike the USA, the presence of children in the household did not worsen labor gender gaps. Sector and occupation, however, play an important role in explaining gender gaps. In particular, we document substantial heterogeneity in the effect of the pandemic on participation, STW, hours worked, and wage outcomes depending on the availability of telework in the respondent's occupation.

This paper analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on household income in Austria, using detailed administrative labor market data, in combination with micro-simulation techniques that enable specific labor market transitions to be modeled. We find that discretionary fiscal policy measures in Austria are key to counteracting the inequality- and poverty-enhancing effect of COVID-19. Additionally, we find that females tend to experience a greater loss in terms of market income. The Austrian tax-benefit system, however, reduces this gender differences. Disposable income has dropped by around 1% for both males and females. By comparison, males profit mainly from short-time work scheme, while females profit especially from other discretionary policy measures, such as the one-off payment for children.

This paper empirically examines the economic effects of COVID-19 vaccine rollouts using a cross-country daily database of vaccinations and high-frequency indicators of economic activity-nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) emissions, carbon monoxide (CO) emissions, and Google mobility indices-for a sample of 46 countries over the period December 16, 2020 to June 20, 2021. Using surprises in vaccines administered, we find that an unexpected increase in vaccination per capita is associated with a significant increase in economic activity. We also find evidence for nonlinear effects of vaccines, with the marginal economic benefits being larger when vaccination rates are higher. Country-specific conditions play an important role, with lower economic gains if strict containment measures are in place or if the country is experiencing a severe outbreak. Finally, the results provide evidence of spillovers across borders, highlighting the importance of equitable access to vaccines across nations.