Dear reader,

With this final newsletter, we thank you for staying engaged with the UBS Center this year. We wish you a pleasant holiday season and look forward to sharing new insights with you in 2026.

Sincere regards,

Ernst Fehr, Director
Hans-Joachim Voth, Scientific Director

New scholarship holders

The UBS Center has awarded scholarships this fall to three outstanding PhD students at the Zurich Graduate School of Economics. Their work explores the behavioral, institutional, and structural forces that shape modern economies. To learn more about their research plans and why the Department of Economics, supported by the UBS Center, offers ideal conditions for their work, read their interviews.

Global trade in crisis – what's next?

Global trade is not collapsing, but it is entering a far more complex and politically contested phase. At the UBS Center Forum, former WTO chief economist Ralph Ossa reminded the audience that “72% of world trade is still conducted under WTO rules,” urging caution against exaggerating the crisis. Barry Eichengreen argued that the U.S. dollars dominant role has endured largely because alternatives remain limited. Yet gradual erosion is possible, driven not by macroeconomic weakness, but by political institutions and trust in the U.S. legal framework.

Thought Supply

Why Africa’s past holds clues for its future

Why did so many African societies resist centralized power and what can this teach us about development today? In a new episode of Thought Supply, Nobel laureate James A. Robinson and development economist Lorenzo Casaburi explore how land, kinship, and traditional authority continue to shape economic outcomes across the continent. 

Inheritance tax: hot emotions and cool calculations

The debate around inheritance taxation consistently stirs emotions. Marius Brülhart opened his UBS Center Webcast presentation by citing a cover of The Economist that declared: “The case for taxing death.” The magazine argued that inheritance taxation is widely disliked, yet fundamentally fair. In Switzerland, which served as Brülhart’s primary reference point, cantons historically levied inheritance taxes, but most of these were gradually abolished.