Has the "Swiss interest rate anomaly" persisted after the financial crisis? Regarding the hypothesis that the Swiss interest rate anomaly results from systemic risk anticipation, we discuss whether Switzerland remains an interest rate island in the wake of the financial crisis. We find evidence...

The impact of corporate income taxes on location decisions of firms is widely debated in the tax competition literature. Tax rate differences across jurisdictions may lead to distortions of firms investment decisions. Empirical evidence on tax induced relocation and subsequent economic...

In the last decades, the majority of OECD countries has experienced a continuous increase in public debt. The European debt crisis has prompted a fundamental re-evaluation of public debt sustainability and the looming threat of sovereign debt default. Due to a multitude of large scale events in...

Following the ambiguous results in the literature aimed at understanding the empirical link between fiscal federalism and economic growth, this paper revisits the question using a Bayesian Model Averaging approach. The analysis suggests that the failure to appropriately account for model...

Rational politicians are interested in judicial independence (JI) in order to make their promises credible. But if politicians preferences deviate from the dicta of the judiciary, they also have incentives to renege on judicial independence. These two conflicting aspects are measured by two...

Over 10 years ago, Feld and Voigt (2003) introduced the first indicator for objectively meas-uring the actual independence of the judiciary and demonstrated its utility in a large cross-section of countries. The indicator has been widely used, but also criticized. This paper pre-sents more...

The standard model of tax evasion based on the subjective expected utility maximization does not perform particularly well in econometric analyses: it predicts too little evasion and produces unsatisfactory econometric parameter estimates. The model is extended by looking at how the tax...

This paper provides new evidence on the sustainability of public finances in German states (Laender) by exploiting a newly compiled database covering the years 1950 - 2011. Unlike previous studies on Germany, we analyze fiscal sustainability by applying "gsecond generation" panel cointegration...

In this paper we analyze the sustainability of public finances in the states (Laender) of the Federal Republic of Germany using an unprecedentedly comprehensive fiscal dataset for the time period from 1950 to 2011 for West German Laender and 1991 to 2011 for East German Laender, respectively. In...