Using Allensbach survey data about how people look forward to the coming year, we construct true ex post-forecasts and compare them with the forecasts produced by the German Council of Economic Experts and by the Economic Research Institutes. Then, we perform rationality tests for these forecast...

Using data of Swiss referenda from 1981 to 1999, this paper presents new empirical results which allow us to discriminate better between the decision and mobilisation hypotheses of electoral participation. First, theoretical considerations which lead to these hypotheses are presented as well as...

Tax competition is supposed to lead to inefficiencies in the provision of public goods and difficulties for decentralized redistribution. A necessary condition for these ef fects to occur is that residence and location decisions are determined by fiscal considerations. In this paper, the impact...

In this paper, the introduction of direct-democratic decision-making in all EU decisions is considered when it is feasible without prohibitively increasing decision-making costs. We start with the contractarian argument that each constitution is a contract joining the citizens of a state and...

The weak rationality principle is not an empirical statement but a heuristic rule of how to proceed in social sciences. It is a necessary ingredient of any ‘understanding’ social science in the Weberian sense. In this paper, first this principle and its role in economic theorizing is...

We first give a brief sketch of the economic tasks the government has to perform, before three issues are discussed in more detail: public production, competition policy, and government interventions in Corporate Governance. These three issues are of particular political relevance in...

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This paper investigates how Swiss consumer prices for gasoline and light heating oil react to changes in corresponding Rotterdam prices and tax rates. Monthly data from January 1977 to June 1993 are employed. After using unit root, Granger causality and cointegration tests error correction...

This paper gives a survey of the empirical results of the impact of direct popular rights on public finances which have been achieved in a project financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Using panel data from the Swiss cantons from 1986 to 1997 and cross-section data from the Swiss...