This paper provides a critical review of competition policy in Switzerland. We analyse the legal statute, the institutional arrangements for its implementation and the case law since 1985.

We model natural disaster insurance in France. We explicitly take into account the main institutional features of the system, such as the uniform premium rate in both high and low risk regions and the existence of a state reinsurance company. Our model indicates that the institutional set-up is...

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) currently holds reserves of more than 40 billion CHF. In the future she wishes to increase her reserves by about 1 billion CHF per year. The new law on the SNB must be used to make the SNB behave according to the same standards as other national banks. Her reserves...

This paper critically analyses the proposed law for regulating the rental housing market. The swiss tenants have made mostly negative experiences with the rate of return regulation practiced in the last 20 years. Nevertheless, the new law does not address these problems. If the new proposed law...

It is widely recognized that "market failure" prevents efficient risk sharing in natural disaster insurance. As a consequence, many countries adopted institutional frameworks presenting public sector participation, often praised as public-private partnerships. We define risk selection as a...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the cost efficiency of private and public property insurance providers in Switzerland. The most commonly used measure for this kind of exercise is the Claims / Premium ratio. We argue that this measure may give strongly biased results. We develop a simple...

This paper studies the state building insurance monopoly in Spain, the Consorcio the Compensacion de Seguros. It is shown that, just like its Swiss counterparts, the Consorcio operates with exceptionally low transactions costs. Furthermore it allows the supply of a very low cost insurance cover...

We argue that there is a natural trade-off between the independence and the accountability of a central bank. Economist's emphasis on the independence aspect has contributed to creating situations, where the central banks' accountability is largely deficient. Attempts to resolve this issue by...

We study, what Switzerland can learn from the disappearance of the property insurance monopolies in Germany. We show that the German insurance monopolies did not fight hard enough to defend their interests. a) Most of them knew that they would be bought up by another public insurance company....

This paper studies the evolution of hurricane insurance in Florida over the last decades. Hurricanes (and other natural catastrophes) are typically referred to as "uninsurable" risks. The more exposed property owners find it difficult to obtain insurance cover from the private market and/or can...