Microeconomics, Industrial Organization, and Environmental Economics

Welcome to the Chair for Microeconomics, Industrial Organization, and Environmental Economics. Here, we study theoretical and applied microeconomics with a special focus on the following subjects:

Industrial Organization:

• Competition, investment and innovation
  (recent and future focus: relation between the intensity of competition and investments into R&D and worker training; interaction of investment decisions with financial constraints; theory and laboratory experiments)
• Organizational Design
  (recent focus: decentralization vs. centralization, assignment of responsibility, effects of reciprocity)
• Vertical industry structures
  (recent focus: explanation of vertical structure in successive oligopolies; relation to investment decisions)
• Procurement auctions and regulation of network industries
  (past focus: provision of investment incentives and role of access prices;
  more recent and future focus: role of competition for the market in the procurement of railway services, in particular, empirical studies for Germany)
• Market dynamics and mergers
  (recent focus: endogenous market dominance through investments and/or mergers; mergers under asymmetric information)
• Games with strategic complementarities
  (focus: applications to industrial organization; relevance for the interpretation of experimental evidence)

Environmental Economics:

• The Political Economy of Environmental Policy Instruments
  (recent focus: effect of lobbying on environmental policy choice, determinants of acceptance chances for environmental policy instruments)
• Transportation and the environment
  (recent focus: empirical analysis of the effects of supporting public transport on environmental outcomes)

Office

Severin Widmer

Office: BLU-309
Phone: +41 (0)44 634 22 05
Fax: +41 (0)44 634 49 07
EMail: severin.widmer@econ.uzh.ch

Office Hours

Address

Blümlisalpstrasse 10
CH-8006 Zürich