This paper critically analyses the proposed law for regulating the rental housing market. The swiss tenants have made mostly negative experiences with the rate of return regulation practiced in the last 20 years. Nevertheless, the new law does not address these problems. If the new proposed law...

It is widely recognized that "market failure" prevents efficient risk sharing in natural disaster insurance. As a consequence, many countries adopted institutional frameworks presenting public sector participation, often praised as public-private partnerships. We define risk selection as a...

According to the Henry George Theorem (HGT), the cost of a pure local public good can be covered through a tax on related land-rents. As we show in this paper, this general proposition does not apply to transport facilities. Nonetheless, even if the "Golden Rule" does not apply in this context,...

This paper presents a preliminary econometric analysis on how different alternative plans affect the utilization of health care services in Switzerland. The data come from the 1992-1993 Swiss health Survey (SHS). We briefly describe some institutional aspects of the Swiss health system which...

We study the impact of changing relative market access in an enlarged EU on the economies of incumbent Objective 1 regions. First, we track the impact of external opening on internal spatial configurations in a three-region economic geography model. External opening gives rise to potentially...