Using panel data for 157 countries over the period 1999-2005 we empirically investigate the politics involved in IMF economic forecasts. We find a systematic bias in growth and inflation forecasts. Our results indicate that countries voting in line with the US in the UN General Assembly receive...

In most developed countries drugs are dispensed to patients through physicians and pharmacists. This paper studies the effects of allowing doctors to directly dispense drugs to patients (self-dispensation) on pharmaceutical coverage. We use a Swiss dataset in our empirical analysis because...

This paper studies the effect of sharing a common native language on international trade. Switzerland hosts three major native language groups which adjoin countries sharing the same native majority languages. In regions close to the internal language border the alternate major language is...

This paper investigates the income convergence among Russian regions in the period 1998-2006. It makes two major contributions to rather extensive literature on the regional convergence in Russia. First, it identifies spatial regimes using the exploratory spatial data analysis. Second, it...

The paper proposes a new test of endogenous vs. exogenous growth theories based on the Granger-causality methodology and applies it to a panel of 20 OECD countries. The test yields divergent evidence with respect to physical and human capital. For physical capital, the test results favor...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...

Deductibles are commonly used to tame increasing health care costs. Numerous studies find that higher deductibles reduce health care utilization. In this paper we compare utilization in Switzerland between two health care plans with deductibles of 1,500 CHF and 2,500 CHF (1CHF =1$) per calendar...

This paper analyzes the labor productivity of Swiss university departments between 1995 and 2007. Using a parametric input distance function we estimate and decompose the Malmquist productivity indexes in line with Fuentes et al. (2001) and Atkinson et al. (2003). By contrast to those studies,...

A large body of both theoretical and empirical literature has affirmed a positive impact of human capital accumulation in the form of health on economic growth. Yet Baumol (1967) has presented a model in which imbalances in productivity growth between a 'progressive' (manufacturing) sector and a...

We empirically analyze convergence of European producer and consumer prices for diesel fuel and investigate the role of excise taxation. By comparing the speed of convergence of prices and taxes we find a surprisingly fast speed of convergence for consumer prices. While this can in part be...