We provide empirical evidence on the impact of personal income taxes and tax competition on income concentration in Switzerland. The fact that Swiss cantons have considerable taxing power enables us to study the effect of differences in the tax burden as well as in the pressure of tax...

We study the income concentration in the Swiss federation over the course of the 20th century using federal income tax statistics. The results suggest that top incomes in Switzerland evolved over time rather remaining constant across different income shares. Income concentration peaked during...

Is income equality a precondition for higher school performance and higher educational mobility? Or is the opposite true? We test empirically whether school performance and intergenerational transmission of educational attainment is depending on income equality on the local level. Using Swiss...

The fiscal commons problem is one of the most prominent explanations of excessive spending and indebtedness in political economics. The more fragmented a government, the higher its spending, deficits and debt. In this paper we investigate to what extent this problem can be miti-gated by...

In this study of the persistent social phenomenon of suicide, we find that even though theological and social differences between Catholicism and Protestantism have decreased, Catholics are still less likely than Protestants to commit or accept suicide. This difference remains even after we...

This article introduces the Fogs Artie program that attempts to close the gap in educational attainment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and provides an evaluation of its effectiveness. The program is of special interest as it uses in-kind incentives conditional on achievement...

The external influence of scholarly activity has to date been measured primarily in terms of publications and citations, metrics that also dominate the promotion and grant processes. Yet the array of scholarly activities visible to the outside world are far more extensive and recently developed...

This study uses the case of professional soccer to investigate the determinants of human capital (HC) specificity. Inspired by labor market research, we formulate three hypotheses on how uncertainty about the usefulness of individuals’ (more productive) specific skills affects their investment...