Obesity has become a major health issue. Research in economics has providedimportant insights as to how technological progress reduced the relative price of food andcontributed to the increase in obesity. However, the increased availability of food might wellhave overstrained will power and led...

The changeover from a situation of Autarky to a situation of Free-Trade alters the trade and production patterns of the participatingcountries which in turn affects the transportation-sector. The amountof transported goods and the directions of the good-flows change.Profit-oriented shipping...

This paper provides a discussion about some recent issues related to the transfer ofcredit risk (CRT) from the perspective of global liquidity. The CRT market is enormouslygrowing and exhibits major structural shifts in terms of buyers and sellers ofprotection. I try to address these issues from...

This paper analyses the intergenerational income mobility for natives and immigrants inSwitzerland. An IV approach based on data from two different data sets is used. As there is noadequate data on fathers, I revert to information from a period that differs from actual fathers’work period....

In many countries, TV viewers have access to more and more TVchannels. We study whether people can cope with this and watch the amount of TVthey find optimal for themselves or whether they are prone to over-consumption. Wefind that heavy TV viewers do not benefit, but instead report lower life...

Die Pro-Kopf-Ausgaben der Schweizer Kantone und Gemeinden unterscheiden sich sehr deutlich: Währendbspw. der Kanton und die Gemeinden von AI im Jahr 2002 nur 7 530 CHF pro Einwohner aufwendeten,beliefen sich die Pro-Kopf-Ausgaben von Basel-Stadt auf über 18 600 CHF2. Die Finanzlage der...

This paper investigates the determinants of Swiss non-financial firms’ cash holdings overthe 1995 to 2004 period. The median Swiss firm holds almost twice as much cash andcash equivalents as the median UK or US firm. Our results indicate that there is a negativerelationship between asset...

We extend the Lucas asset pricing tree economy to a heterogeneous population.Perturbative methods are applied to explicitly calculate the secondorder response of asset returns to heterogeneity. We discover thatthere exists a unique "best homogeneous approximation" to a weakly...

Many countries are forging ahead with convenient balloting methods, in particularelectronic and postal voting, in order to re-engage voters. In this paper, we test whether thecost reductions with postal voting increase turnout. The empirical analysis is based on anewly collected data set on the...

This paper presents simple su±cient conditions under which optimal bunches inadverse-selection principal-agent problems can be characterized without using optimal controltheory.