This paper starts by reviewing the recent literature on antitrust laws in banking from the perspective of general economic analysis. We focus on the US experience for didactic reasons and as a background against which the Swiss case is discussed further on. After an introductory section, we...

A new method is proposed to measure the underlying ("structural") surplus/deficit of a government budget. It does not rest on the notion of "full-employment GDP" but aims at modelling the fiscal behavior of the government in the widest sense. The basic idea is to identify what is systematic in...