A home-bias in public purchases can have non-trivial efficiency effects, especially in times of crises. Using unexplored Japanese and Swiss public procurement data over 1990-2003, we examine the presence of a home-bias by controlling for the effect of macroeconomic, political economy,...

This paper contains an independent empirical analysis of the effect of a Notice, issued by the Swiss Competition Commission in 2002 concerning vertical agreements between manufacturers and distributors of motor vehicles, on the degree to which the subsequent prices of cars in Switzerland...

This paper contains an independent empirical analysis of the effect of a Notice, issued by the Swiss Competition Commission in 2002 concerning vertical agreements between manufacturers and distributors of motor vehicles, on the degree to which the subsequent prices of cars in Switzerland...

Against a backdrop of sharply rising inequality, the Tokyo Round of the GATT resulted in a 1.6 percentage point reduction in average US tariffs – larger than CUS-FTA, NAFTA, and the liberalization accompanying the granting of PNTR to China. We construct a novel IV based on the so-called...

Exporting firms do not only decide how much of their products they ship abroad but also at which frequency. Doing so, they face a trade-off between saving on fixed costs per shipments (by shipping large amounts infrequently) and saving on storage costs (by delivering just in time with small and...

For the case of Switzerland, this paper endeavours to uncover in how far officially backed guarantees on trade finance achieve their stipulated goal of promoting exports. The results of gravity equations suggest that the Swiss Export Risk Insurance scheme increases exports in the manufacturing...