So far the discussion in Switzerland about the social costs and benefits of higher capital requirements resulting from the new Basel III Accord and the Swiss Too Big To Fail legislation has been heavily qualitative. This paper provides a quantitative view and estimates the long-run costs and...

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending and indebtedness in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending, deficits and debt. In this paper we investigate to what extent this problem can be mitigated by different...

This paper extends the analysis of Junge and Kugler (2013) on the effects of increased capital requirements on Swiss GDP and obtains the following main results: First the Modigliani-Miller effect is robust with respect to a substantial extension of the data base and yields an offset of capital...

The link between federalism and economic performance is still ambiguous. Aiming at clarification, we improve on a widespread shortcoming by measuring federalism not just by one variable but by various institutions that constitute it. To this end, Switzerland provides for a laboratory as its 26...

Previous theoretical and empirical research has shown that policymakers have an incentive to centralize government activities in order to weaken the com-petitive pressure of fiscal federalism. We propose and test a positive model of fiscal federalism in which centralization is less likely to...

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending and indebtedness in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending, deficits and debt. In this paper we investigate to what extent this problem can be mitigated by different...

So far the discussion in Switzerland about the social costs and benefits of higher capital requirements resulting from the new Basel III Accord and the Swiss Too Big To Fail legislation has been heavily qualitative. This paper provides a quantitative view and estimates the long-run costs and...