Andrin Spescha

Digitalisierung in der Schweizer Wirtschaft: Technologiestand und Auswirkungen auf Beschäftigung und Qualifikation der Beschäftigten

The first Swiss survey on digitalization of autumn 2016, yields, first, an overview about the diffusion rate of several digital technologies in the period 2013–2015. Second, the responding firms report practically no effects of digitalization on employment until 2016. Third, according to the survey answers modest digitalization-induced net employment increases were reported for the following employee categories: employees with tertiary-level education from universities, universities of applied sciences and other educational institutions of tertiary-level education as well as employees with secondary-level vocational education. This is the case particularly for employees from universities of applied sciences and of secondary-level vocational education. Small employment increases are reported also for apprentices. On the contrary, firms report decrease of the employment of employees with low or no vocational education.

Policy Spillovers: The Impact of Foreign Policy on Domestic Creation of Green Energy Innovation

In this paper, we investigate, based on a representative sample of Swiss and German firms, the impact of foreign green energy related policies on domestic innovation activities. Under control of the respective domestic policy stringency, we find a significant positive effect of foreign regulations, foreign voluntary agreements, and foreign public subsidies. However, when we introduce foreign (policy induced) demand, the significant effects of the other foreign policies vanish. Hence, we see that foreign policy impacts domestic innovation primarily from the demand side. We further find that foreign subsidies negatively affect domestic innovation activities of foreign owned firms operating in domestic. Finally, we find that foreign policies dampen the effect of national policy initiatives. Our results therefore call for an international coordination of policy initiatives to increase the effectiveness of the respective national policies.