This paper starts by reviewing the recent literature on antitrust laws in banking from the perspective of general economic analysis. We focus on the US experience for didactic reasons and as a background against which the Swiss case is discussed further on. After an introductory section, we...

A new method is proposed to measure the underlying ("structural") surplus/deficit of a government budget. It does not rest on the notion of "full-employment GDP" but aims at modelling the fiscal behavior of the government in the widest sense. The basic idea is to identify what is systematic in...

Trying to ascertain scientifically the existence and importance of gender-based salary discrimination runs into conceptual and technical difficulties, the implications of which are not always fully appreciated: depending on the approach used, our analysis of a large sample for Switzerland in...

" Switzerland is the growth laggard in the industrial world " - this dismal view has become part and parcel of today's conventional wisdom in Switzerland and elsewhere. We show it to be but partially true : accurate when judged by the trend growth rate of officially recorded real GDPs in...

Whereas the data on civilian refugees admitted by Switzerland during the war are accepted by all, the figures on persons turned away are much more uncertain. Everyone uses today the 1996 estimates by Guido Koller. It is shown that these estimates were calculated in a questionable manner and that...