Liechtenstein Institute

We study how poor hand-to-mouth and wealthy hand-to-mouth households in the United States form their expectations as compared to unconstrained households. To do so, we use monthly household data for the period 2005:2 to 2013:6 with information on the exact survey day for each household within a month. Utilizing a timeline of financial crisis events along with changes in stock market values and uncertainty in the days around those events, we assess the response of these households' expectations regarding inflation, unemployment, and the interest rate. Our estimates imply differences in the formation of expectations for liquidity-constrained households relative to unconstrained households. Wealthy hand-to-mouth households tend to revise their inflation expectations downwards substantially so that they make lower forecast errors following adverse financial crisis events that lower the actual future inflation rate, while other households appear inattentive to these shocks. This suggests that the wealthy hand-to-mouth households decipher these financial events' noisy signal regarding lower future inflation more accurately than other households, in line with having a greater incentive to do so.

This study empirically examines the effects of High Involvement Management (HIM) on establishment productivity. To achieve this it draws on a large-scale panel data set representative of the German economy. The identification strategy exploits the bracketing property of fixed effects and lagged dependent variable models and supplements this with a selection-on-observables approach to estimate causal effects. Descriptive evidence indicates that decision makers value the joint implementation of the pillars of HIM (Knowledge, Power, Information, and Rewards), as they tend to cluster and factor analysis confirms that the included management practices reflect a single underlying management orientation. The causal analysis reveals significant productivity gains from HIM and each of its four pillars. These effects materialize for HIM adoption, HIM intensification and the presence of a HIM philosophy. While the results are in line with a monotonically increasing effect as additional pillars are adopted, no synergies between the pillars or underlying practices emerge. Finally, the findings reveal no meaningful differences in the effectiveness of HIM across establishment size, sector, knowledge intensity, or innovation strategy, suggesting that its impact is broadly consistent across organizational contexts.

The international Financial Crisis of 2008/2009 is used as a case study, with a unique dataset of 210 countries to examine potential resilience factors and with particular focus on population size, along with other pre-crisis determinants. The cross-section regressions suggest that smaller country size was associated with higher vulnerability (ceteris paribus), which is reflected in a larger initial impact magnitude of the Financial Crisis shock. The smallness disadvantage began to unfold for countries with a population size of between 1 and 10 million, and was particularly severe for the very small states with considerably less than 1 million inhabitants. This result emphasizes that small state characteristics drive economic resilience and volatility beyond factors already identified in the literature. There is also significant evidence that the shock impact persistence was prolonged by smaller country size. Thus, the disadvantage of smallness in terms of higher exposure has dominated the advantages of small countries in terms of flexibility and adaptation speed. Moreover, smaller states were on average hit earlier.

In most Swiss municipalities and two cantons, voting means attending a public assembly rather than casting a ballot. This article investigates the extent to which participation in such assemblies is shaped by different patterns of social selectivity compared to ballot voting. Using survey data from one canton and four municipalities, we show that while none of the three institutional settings—ballot voting, cantonal Landsgemeinde, or municipal assemblies—is consistently more inclusive or exclusive, they differ markedly in the socio‐structural composition of participants. The Landsgemeinde attracts an electorate that is neither biased by age nor by homeownership but exhibits the strongest distortion by formal education. In contrast, municipal assemblies show balanced participation across educational groups, but overrepresentation of elderly, homeowners, employed individuals, and, to some extent, men. Furthermore, we show that social embeddedness — such as length of residence — strongly motivates participation in assembly democracy but plays little role in ballot votes.

Using granular customs data, we construct a counterfactual of the evolution of Swiss goods exports under the premise that the minimum exchange rate policy would have been continued. We study the adjustment dynamics of aggregate and sectoral goods exports due to the exchange rate shock in January 2015 and examine potential differences between sectors. While Swiss total nominal exports drop in Swiss Franc, they increase in Euro. In real quantities, total exports remain largely unaffected indicating a high degree of resilience of the Swiss export industry. At the sectoral level, we observe a heterogeneous adjustment of exports consistent with varying degrees of supply-side adjustment flexibility.