In this paper, we propose a theoretical model to study the effect of income insecurity of parents and offspring on the child's residential choice. Parents are partially altruistic toward their children and will provide financial help to an independent child when her income is low relative to the...

The Great Recession, and the fiscal response to it, has revived interest in the size of fiscal multipliers. Standard business cycle models have difficulties generating multipliers greater than one. And they also fail to produce any significant asymmetry in the size of the multipliers over the...

We analyze non-cooperative international climate policy in a setting of political competition by national interest groups. In the first stage, countries decide whether to set up an international emission permits market, which only forms if it is supported by all countries. In the second stage,...

Contrary to standard agnostic statistical approaches an output gap estimate based on a New Keynesian Small Open Economy model provides the possibility to analyze the driving forces of the variation in GDP caused by nominal rigidities. This paper makes use of this and provides an estimate of a...

We use recent developments in the empirics of comparative case studies to analyze the effect of binding emission targets under the Kyoto Protocol on the development of CO2 emissions of seven major Annex B countries. In particular, we investigate whether committing to a specific greenhouse gas...

The extent to which exchange rate fluctuations are passed through to domestic prices is of high relevance for open economies and for monetary authorities targeting price stability. Existing empirical studies estimating the exchange rate pass-through for Switzerland are based on either single...

There is an ongoing discussion especially among political scientists and economists whether and how climate variability affects civil conflicts and wars in developing countries. Given the predicted climatic changes, several studies argue that increasing temperatures or decreasing precipitation...

We estimate the causal effect of having full health insurance on health care expenditures. We take advantage of a unique quasi-experimental setup in which deductibles and co- payments were zero in a managed care plan, and non-zero in regular insurance, until a policy change forced all...

This paper studies the identification of coefficients in generalized linear predictors where the outcome variable suffers from non-classical measurement errors. Combining a mixture model of data errors with the bounding procedure proposed by Stoye (2007) derive bounds on the coefficient vector...

We analyze whether the possibility for physicians to dispense drugs increases health care expenditures due to the incentives created by the markup on drugs sold. Using comprehensive physician-level data from Switzerland, we exploit the fact that there is regional variation in the dispensing...