Taking into account the Swiss experience, this paper considers some aspects of the current reform discussion concerning the German health insurance system. The income dependence of effective premia, their size and their distributional consequences are discussed. The potential role of competition...

Using Swiss data from 1983 to 2008, this paper investigates whether growth rates of the different measures of the quantity of money and or excess money can be used to forecast inflation. After a preliminary data analysis, money demand relations are specified, estimated and tested. Then,...

There is an intensive dispute in political economics about the impact of institutions on income redistribution. While the main focus is on comparison between different forms of representative democracy, the influence of direct democracy on redistribution has attracted much less attention. In...