Child-care subsidies are meant to facilitate work for mothers with small children. The paper demonstrates that the predominant current subsidy scheme in Switzerland, which ties the subsidies to realized income (but not to potential income), creates strongly negative work incentives especially...

Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individual attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, this paper assesses such positional impact on social capital by applying 14 different measurements to International Social Survey Programme data from 25 countries. We...

Lechner and Miquel (2001) approached the causal analysis of sequences of interventions from a potential outcome perspective based on selection on observable type of assumptions (sequential conditional independence assumptions). Lechner (2004) proposed matching estimators for this framework....

This paper provides a concise overview of the state of the art on monetary policy and central banking from a public choice perspective. It starts with a brief look at the roots of today’s view of monetary policy conduct and the design of pertinent institutions in early work on political...

Swiss banking secrecy laws not only tempt foreign investors to remain silent about at least part of their capital incomes and, thus, not pay taxes as obliged by law. Therefore, Switzerland introduced a withholding tax on capital income in 1934, primarily in order to coerce domestic residents to...

This paper looks at how income tax rates, consumption and public spending respond as venues for tax evasion open or close. The analysis draws on a 16-generation OLG model in which tax rates are determined in a repeated game between voters and a rent-seeking Leviathan government. Key insights...

We estimate the effects of active labour market policies (ALMP) on subsequent employment by nonparametric instrumental variables and matching estimators. Very informative administrative Swiss data with detailed regional information are combined with exogenous regional variation in programme...

We estimate the effect of age of school entry on educational attainment using three different data sets for Germany, sampling pupils at the end of primary school, in the middle of secondary school and several years after secondary school. Results are obtained based on instrumental variable...

There is an ongoing discussion in Germany about the implementation of tax credits in order to reintegrate low-skilled workers into the labor market. This paper aims at analyzing the policy instrument of tax credits in a theoretical model that systematically compares its costs and benefits in the...

We estimate short, medium, and long-run individual labor market effects of training programs for unemployed by following program participation on a monthly basis over a tenyear period. Since analyzing the effectiveness of training over such a long period is impossible with experimental data, we...