Does the enfranchisement of women lead to an increase in public support for government spending? By utilizing a natural experiment from Switzerland, I test this hypothesis empirically. I analyze the voting outcomes of two very similar referendum ballots concerning the federal government's...

In September 2009, G20 representatives called for introducing a minimum leverage ratio as an instrument of financial regulation. It is supposed to assure a certain degree of core capital for banks, independent of the controversial procedures used to assess risk. This paper discusses the...

We investigate the political determinants of risk premiums which sub-national governments in Switzerland have to pay for their sovereign bond emissions. For this purpose we make use of financial market data from 288 tradable cantonal bonds in the period from 1981 to 2007. Our main focus is on...

We estimate the causal effect of immigration on unemployment, employment and wages of resident employees in Switzerland, whose foreign labor force has increased by 32.8% in the last ten years. To address endogeneity of immigration into different labor market cells, we develop new variants of the...

This paper analyses the intergenerational income mobility for natives and immigrants in Switzerland. An IV approach based on data from two different data sets is used. As there is no adequate data on fathers, I revert to information from a period that differs from actual fathers' work period....

As is well known, the uncovered interest rate parity fails in the short run but usually holds in the long run. This paper analyses the long and short run interest rate parity of 10 mayor OECD currencies and finds that there is a long run failure of the uncovered interest rate parity condition...

This paper analyzes forward-looking rules for Swiss monetary policy in a small structural VAR model consisting of four variables taking into account data revisions for GDP. First, the paper develops an analytical method to analyze the effect of data revision errors in GDP on the ex ante or...

Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt die Ergebnisse einer Fragebogenuntersuchung unter deutschen, schweizerischen und österreichischen börsenkotierten Unternehmen über deren Motive zur Emission von Wandelanleihen vor. Die Antworten der Unternehmen bestätigen die Backdoor- Equity-Hypothese, wonach...

Why do some countries join the EU earlier than others, why do others wait? In order to answer this question we apply the theory of investment under uncertainty (Dixit and Pindyck, 1994) to the decision on EU-membership. We develop a simplified model of two periods to study how the value of...

This paper revisits the puzzle of low returns on Swiss Franc assets using a new data set of portfolio holdings of residents and non residents at Swiss banks. The main findings are as follows. First, we find that the return anomaly is present only for fixed income assets and not for equity....