Central banks have evolved for close to four centuries. This paper argues that for two centuries central banks caught up to the strategies followed by the leading central banks of the era; the Bank of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Federal Reserve in the twentieth...

In this paper we provide empirical measures of central bank credibility and augment these with historical narratives from eleven countries. To the extent we are able to apply reliable institutional information we can also indirectly assess their role in influencing the credibility of the...

This paper examines the historical evolution of central bank credibility using both historical narrative and empirics for a group of 16 countries, both advanced and emerging. It shows how the evolution of credibility has gone through a pendulum where credibility was high under the classical gold...

This essay aims to explain the nature of monetary and fiscal policy interactions and how those interactions could inform the fiscal rules that countries choose to follow. It makes two points: (1) monetary policy control of inflation requires appropriate fiscal backing; (2) European fiscal...

Switzerland could be considered as a test case for international corporate-tax policy coordination. It is a federation of 26 fiscally autonomous cantons that have been taxing corporate profits more or less independently for over a century. We document and discuss corporate taxation in...

Using a simple case study approach. this paper compares the conduct and performance of monetary policy in six Industrialized countries since the breakup of the Bretton Woods system. Our purpose is to develop fruitful hypotheses that might usefully be explored in subsequent, more formal research....

This paper extends previous work on the information in the term structure at longer maturities to other countries besides the United states, using a newly constructed data set for 1 to 5 year interest rates from Britain, West Germany and Switzerland. Even with wide differences in inflation...

We study a reform that granted European cross-border workers free access to the Swiss labor market and had a stronger effect on regions close to the border. The greater availability of cross-border workers increased foreign employment substantially. Although many cross-border workers were highly...

We exploit a unique Swiss reform to identify the importance of passivity, claiming social security benefits at the Full Retirement Age (FRA). Sharp discontinuities generated by the reform reveal that raising the FRA while imposing small early claiming penalties significantly delays pension...

This paper evaluates proposals for an annual wealth tax. While a dozen OECD countries levied wealth taxes in the recent past, now only three retain them, with only Switzerland raising a comparable fraction of revenue as recent proposals for a US wealth tax. Studies of these taxes sometimes, but...