Fabienne Kiener, Ann-Sophie Gnehm, Uschi Backes-Gellner, Noncognitive skills in training curricula and nonlinear wage returns, International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 44 (4), 2023. (Journal Article)
 
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate self-competence—the ability to act responsibly on one's own—and likely nonlinear wage returns across different levels of self-competence as part of training curricula.
Design/methodology/approach: The authors identify the teaching of self-competence at the occupational level by applying machine-learning methods to the texts of occupational training curricula. Defining three levels of self-competence (high, medium, and low) and using individual labor market data, the authors examine nonlinearities in wage returns to different levels of self-competence.
Findings: The authors find nonlinear returns to teaching self-competence: a medium level of self-competence taught in an occupation has the largest wage returns compared to low or high levels. However, in occupations with a high cognitive requirement profile, a high level of self-competence generates positive wage returns.
Originality/value: This paper first adds to research on the importance of teaching noncognitive skills for economic outcomes, which recently—in addition to personality traits research—has primarily focused on social skills by introducing self-competence as another largely unexplored but important noncognitive skill. Second, the paper studies not only average but also nonlinear wage returns, showing that the right level of self-competence is crucial, i.e. neither teaching too little nor too much self-competence provides favorable returns because of trade-offs with other skills (e.g. technical or professional skills). Third, the paper also examines complementarities between cognitive skills and noncognitive skills, again pointing toward nonlinear returns, i.e. only in occupations with a high cognitive requirement profile, high levels of self-competence generate positive wage returns. |
|
Tim Phillips, Michel Habib, Implementing central bank policy in China, In: VoxTalks Economics, 26 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

How do China’s government-owned commercial banks respond to informal guidance from The People’s Bank of China? Their reaction to recent guidance designed to cool off mortgage lending offers a fascinating insight into how the banking sector works in China. Michel Habib of the University of Zurich talks to Tim Phillips. |
|
Hilmar Scheel, Thorsten Hens, Steigende Zinsen sind negativ, In: Handelszeitung, 26 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

|
|
Redaktion, Marc Chesney, Credit Suisse - Bonus en suspens, In: RTS Un, 24 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

|
|
Andrea Giuffredi-Kähr, Lucia Malär, Influencer Sharenting – How Can Children’s Privacy Rights Be (Better) Protected?, In: Conference of the European Marketing Academy, EMAC. 2023. (Conference Presentation)

|
|
Giulia Crestini, Andrea Giuffredi-Kähr, Radu Tanase, Martin Natter, DOES PRICE TRANSPARENCY BENEFIT OR HARM ONLINE RETAILERS? A RETAILER AND CUSTOMER PERSPECTIVE , In: Conference of the European Marketing Academy, EMAC. 2023. (Conference Presentation)

|
|
Redaktion, Markus Leippold, Tokenisierung von nachhaltigen Infrastrukturprojekten, In: Absolut Research, 22 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

|
|
Dario Laudati, Manuel Mariani, Luciano Pietronero, Andrea Zaccaria, The different structure of economic ecosystems at the scales of companies and countries, Journal of Physics: Complexity, Vol. 4 (2), 2023. (Journal Article)
 
A key element to understand complex systems is the relationship between the spatial scale of investigation and the structure of the interrelation among its elements. When it comes to economic systems, it is now well-known that the country-product bipartite network exhibits a nested structure, which is the foundation of different algorithms that have been used to scientifically investigate countries' development and forecast national economic growth. Changing the subject from countries to companies, a significantly different scenario emerges. Through the analysis of a unique dataset of Italian firms' exports and a worldwide dataset comprising countries' exports, here we find that, while a globally nested structure is observed at the country level, a local, in-block nested structure emerges at the level of firms. This in-block nestedness is statistically significant with respect to suitable null models and the algorithmic partitions of products into blocks correspond well with the UN-COMTRADE product classification. These findings lay a solid foundation for developing a scientific approach based on the physics of complex systems to the analysis of companies, which has been lacking until now. |
|
Jon King, Marc Chesney, Credit Suisse's 'rushed' UBS rescue blasted by economist as taxpayers foot the bill, In: Express, 16 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

|
|
Steven Ongena, Banks and Climate, In: Workshop on Climate Finance . 2023. (Conference Presentation)

|
|
Katy Romy, Marc Chesney, "Dovremo sopportare per anni il costo del salvataggio di Credit Suisse", In: SWI swissinfo.ch, 15 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

Anche se la Svizzera si vanta volentieri di essere un modello di democrazia, né il Parlamento né il popolo hanno avuto voce in capitolo nel salvataggio di Credit Suisse. "Si tratta di un diniego della democrazia", affermano la giornalista economica Myret Zaki e l'economista Marc Chesney nel nostro dibattito. |
|
Alberto Huertas Celdran, Pedro Miguel Sánchez Sánchez, Chao Feng, Gérôme Bovet, Gregorio Martínez Pérez, Burkhard Stiller, Privacy-preserving and Syscall-based Intrusion Detection System for IoT Spectrum Sensors Affected by Data Falsification Attacks, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Vol. 10 (10), 2023. (Journal Article)
 
Crowdsensing platforms collect, process, transmit, and analyze spectrum data worldwide to optimize radio frequency spectrum usage. However, Internet-of-Things (IoT) spectrum sensors, performing some of the previous tasks, are exposed to software manipulation aiming to execute spectrum sensing data falsification (SSDF) attacks to compromise data integrity and spectrum optimization. Novel intrusion detection systems (IDSs) combining device fingerprinting with Machine and Deep Learning (ML/DL) improve the limitation of traditional solutions and remove the necessity of redundant sensors and reputation mechanisms. However, they fail when detecting SSDF attacks accurately while protecting sensors privacy. This work proposes a novel host-based and federated learning-oriented IDS for IoT spectrum sensors that considers unsupervised ML/DL and fingerprints based on system calls. The framework detection performance and consumption of resources are analyzed in local and federated scenarios with six spectrum sensors deployed on Raspberry Pis. The obtained results significantly improve related work when detecting SSDF attacks while protecting sensors privacy, and consuming CPU, memory, and storage of sensors in a reduced manner. |
|
Roy Adrian Rutishauser, André Meyer, Reid Holmes, Thomas Fritz, Semi-Automatic, Inline and Collaborative Web Page Code Curations, In: International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'23), 2023-05-14. (Conference or Workshop Paper published in Proceedings)
 
Software developers spend about a quarter of their workday using the web to fulfill various information needs. Searching for relevant information online can be time-consuming, yet acquired information is rarely systematically persisted for later reference. In this work, we introduce SALI, an approach for semi-automated linking web pages to source code locations inline with the source code. SALI helps developers naturally capture high-quality, explicit links between web pages and specific source code locations by suggesting links for curation within the IDE. Through two laboratory studies, we examined the developer’s ability to both curate and consume links between web pages and specific source code locations while performing software development tasks. The studies were performed with 20 subjects working on realistic software change tasks from widely-used open-source projects. Results showed that developers continuously and concisely curate web pages at meaningful locations in the code with little effort. Additionally, we showed that other developers could use these curations while performing new and different change tasks to speed up relevant information gathering within unfamiliar codebases by a factor of 2.4. |
|
Redaktion, Markus Leippold, Climate Finance and AI, In: TEDx, 13 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

TEDx Talk on Climate Finance and AI, May 13, 2023 in Paris |
|
Emanuela Benincasa, Gazi Kabas, Steven Ongena, "There is No Planet B", But for Banks There are "Countries B to Z": Domestic Climate Policy and Cross-Border Bank Lending., In: Spring Conference 2023 Climate Change and Central Banks. 2023. (Conference Presentation)

We provide evidence that banks increase cross-border lending in response to higher climate policy stringency in their home countries. Saturating with granular set of fixed effects and including a rich set of control variables, we show that the increase in cross-border lending is not driven by loan demand and/or other bank home country characteristics. In line with banks use cross-border lending as a regulatory arbitrage tool, the increase in cross-border lending occurs only if banks' home countries have more stringent climate policy compared to their borrowers' countries. The effect is stronger for large, lowly capitalized banks with high NPL ratios and for banks with more experience in cross-border lending. Our results suggest that without a global cooperation, cross-border lending can be a channel that reduces the effectiveness of climate policies. |
|
Winifred Huang, Philip Molyneux, Steven Ongena, Ru Xie, The new challenges of global banking and finance, The European Journal of Finance, Vol. forthcoming, 2023. (Journal Article)

The economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented uncertainty to the global banking system. Banks are facing critical market challenges driven by uncertain monetary policies, deterioration in credit quality, and regulation and compliance pressures. These challenges highlight the importance of better understanding the new role of financial intermediations in facilitating efficient capital allocations and economic development. This article reviews the related literature on monetary policy uncertainty, bank performance, digital finance, and introduces articles on these themes. Finally, we propose potential areas for future research. |
|
Caroline Hartmann, Marc Chesney, Zentralbanken drängen zur «kontrollierten Auflösung der Wirtschaft», In: Zeitpunkt, 11 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

Die Zinssteigerungen schwächen vor allem Regionalbanken, die dann von den Grossbanken – grosszügig gepolstert von staatlichen Einrichtungen – geschluckt werden. In den USA wird dabei wie in der Schweiz geltendes Recht gebrochen. |
|
Redaktion, Christoph Basten, Bankgeheimnis verhindert strengere Regulierung, In: finews.ch, 10 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

Der Schweizer Finanzplatz rühmt sich gerne für seine Regulierungsqualität. Allerdings gibt es einige Länder, die es offenbar besser machen. |
|
Fabienne Kiener, Christian Eggenberger, Uschi Backes-Gellner, The role of occupational skill sets in the digital transformation: how it progress shapes returns to specialization and social skills, Journal of Business Economics / Zeitschrift für Betriebswirtschaft, 2023. (Journal Article)
 
Workers’ occupational skill sets play a crucial role in successfully handling digital transformation. We investigate whether and how different types of occupational skill sets benefit from digital transformation. We theoretically and empirically analyze wage returns of workers in occupations with more or less specialized skill sets and with more or less social skills when IT increases in their industry. Applying natural language processing methods to the texts of occupational training curricula, we develop measures for occupational specialization and social skills. We use vocational education and training curricula from Switzerland because they cover approx. two-thirds of the working population. Using curricula, industry-level IT data and individual-level administrative wage data, our individual fixed-effects analyses show that IT progress leads to higher wage returns for workers in highly specialized occupations but not for workers in more general occupations. In addition, we find that high levels of social skills cannot make up for this difference when IT advances. However, our results indicate that for workers with high specialization, a combination with high social skills generates additional benefits when IT advances. Overall, our results suggest that, contrary to typical assumptions in educational policy debates, workers with specialized occupational skill sets - possibly in combination with high social skills - appear to be the ones who are particularly well prepared to cope with digital transformation. |
|
Tiziano Rugi, Stefano Battiston, Direttiva sul reporting di sostenibilità: le aziende sono pronte?, In: EconomiaCircolare.com, 9 May 2023. (Media Coverage)

La direttiva CSRD impone alle imprese di stilare dei report di sostenibilità: si tratta di una norma facoltativa, ma secondo gli esperti tutti avranno l’interesse a farlo sia per ottenere finanziamenti dalle banche sia per evitare danni di reputazione con i consumatori. C’è, però, chi ancora non è pronto. |
|