Women earn less than men but are not less satisfied with life. This paper argues that norms on the appropriate pay for women compared to men explain these findings. We take citizens’ approval of an equal rights amendment to the Swiss constitution as a proxy for the norm that women and men...

How does the enfranchisement of women influence public support for government spending? To answer this question, I analyze the voting outcomes of two very similar Swiss referendum ballots concerning the federal government's competency to levy income, capital and turnover taxes. The first ballot...

Meltzer and Richard (1981) famously hypothesized that enfranchising new constituents such that the new median voter is poorer than before, increases the demand for redistribution and state expenditure. Consequently, one would expect that extending the suffrage to women should increase the...

This project is the result of a search on labour market participation of Swiss married women. We want to analyze why most of these women are part of the labor force. The result is that most of the examined women are not part of the Swiss labor force because they have an high no-labor income,...

In this paper, I analyze the voting outcomes of two very similar Swiss referendum ballots concerning the federal government's competency to levy income, capital and turnover taxes to find out how the enfranchisement of women influences public support for government spending. The first ballot...