This paper analyzes a recent ballot in which two virtually identical popular initiatives, both demanding a decrease in the legal age of retirement in Switzerland, led to differences in approval rates of nearly seven percentage points. Based on this unique natural experiment, the existence of...

Nominal and real U.S. interest rates (1997-2007) are combined with inflation expectations from the Survey of Professional Forecasters to calculate time series of "inflation risk premia." It is shown that survey data on inflation and output growth uncertainty, as well as a proxy for liquidity...

An affine yield curve model is estimated on daily Swiss data 2002--2009. The market price of risk is modelled in terms of proxies for uncertainty, which are estimated from interest rate options. The estimated model generates innovations in the 3-month rate that are similar to external evidence...

Rapach et al. (2013) have recently shown that U.S. equity market returns carry valuable information to improve return forecasts in a large cross-section of international equity markets. In this study, we extend the work of Rapach et al. (2013) and examine if U.S. based equity market information...

We construct an empirical heterogeneous agent model which optimally combines forecasts from fundamentalist and chartists agents and evaluate its out-of-sample forecast performance using daily date covering the period from January 1999 to June 2014 for six of the most widely traded currencies. We...

This paper investigates the consequences of pension reform for life-cycle unemployment and retirement. We find that (i) improving actuarial fairness in pension assessment not only boosts old age participation but also reduces unemployment among prime age workers and raises welfare; (ii)...

A social market economy, together with corrective government activities, allows citizens to achieve the highest possible welfare with limited resources. Income and welfare, however, tend to be very unequally distributed in society. Most theories of justice call for some redistribution for a more...

Previous empirical literature has shown a substantial extent of work disincentives in the Disability Insurance (DI). While its focus has been on the inflow into DI and on increases in benefits, this study focuses on a partial benefit cut and on existing beneficiaries. The partial benefit...

Disability insurance (DI) beneficiaries lose some of their benefits if their earnings exceed certain thresholds (“cash-cliffs”). When this reduction is too high, this implicit taxation of earnings is considered to be one of the prime reasons for the low outflow from DI. This paper analyzes a...

This paper investigates the dynamic consequences of demographic change and various pension reform scenarios for Austria. The analysis is based on a computable overlapping generations model with life-cycle labor supply, savings, and search unemployment. The public sector is decomposed into...