This paper aims to estimate the price and income elasticities of the demand for essential commodities in Cote d'Ivoire. Using data from the 2002 Cote d'Ivoire Living Standard Survey and a theoretical framework developed by Crawford et al. (2003), we analyse price effects on the demand for groups...

This study uses two waves (2004-2005 and 2011-2012) of the nationally representative Indian Human Development Survey to conduct a systematic decompositional analysis of the demographic and socio-economic factors contributing to undernutrition among children under five in India. The analytic...

A common political claim is that decentralized governments undermine policy makers' ability to fight fiscal imbalance. This paper examines how different fiscal institutions influence the likelihood of a successful fiscal adjustment. Using a panel of the Swiss cantons from 1981 to 2001, we first...

This paper explores the role of political stability on fiscal policy choices in a time-series analysis over 158 years on the Swiss federal level. We argue that the fiscal-commons problem of public finances is affected by the time-horizon of a finance minister. Arguably, the incentives for an...

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for the influence of income taxes on the choice of residence of taxpayers at the local level. The fact that Swiss communities can individually set tax multipliers thereby shifting the progressive tax scheme which is fixed at the cantonal (state) level...

We investigate the relationship between income tax rate variation and internal migration for the unique case of Switzerland, whose system of determining tax rates primarily at the community level results in enough variation to permit analysis of their influence on migration. Specifically, using...

This paper evaluates the relationship between job satisfaction and measures of health of workers using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Methodologically, it addresses two important design problems encountered frequently in the literature: (a) cross-sectional causality problems and (b)...

Implementing performance pay requires that workers' output be measured. When measurement costs differ among firms, those with a measurement cost advantage choose to implement performance pay. They attract the best workers, and both the level and variability of compensation are higher at these...

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending and indebtedness in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending, deficits and debt. In this paper we investigate to what extent this problem can be mitigated by different...