In German literature, particularly in poetry, an amazing wealth of illustrations for economic contract theory can be found. Signaling, screening, incentive contracts, the winner's curse, and even the prisoner's dilemma within a team are treated by different writers. The respective examples are...

In the absence of financing frictions, profit taxes reduce investment by their effect on the user cost of capital. With finance constraints due to moral hazard, investment becomes sensitive to cash-flow and own equity of firms. The impact of taxes changes fundamentally. Taxes reduce investment...

Child-care subsidies are meant to facilitate work for mothers with small children. The paper demonstrates that the predominant current subsidy scheme in Switzerland, which ties the subsidies to realized income (but not to potential income), creates strongly negative work incentives especially...

Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individual attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, this paper assesses such positional impact on social capital by applying 14 different measurements to International Social Survey Programme data from 25 countries. We...

Lechner and Miquel (2001) approached the causal analysis of sequences of interventions from a potential outcome perspective based on selection on observable type of assumptions (sequential conditional independence assumptions). Lechner (2004) proposed matching estimators for this framework....

This paper provides a concise overview of the state of the art on monetary policy and central banking from a public choice perspective. It starts with a brief look at the roots of today’s view of monetary policy conduct and the design of pertinent institutions in early work on political...

Swiss banking secrecy laws not only tempt foreign investors to remain silent about at least part of their capital incomes and, thus, not pay taxes as obliged by law. Therefore, Switzerland introduced a withholding tax on capital income in 1934, primarily in order to coerce domestic residents to...

This paper looks at how income tax rates, consumption and public spending respond as venues for tax evasion open or close. The analysis draws on a 16-generation OLG model in which tax rates are determined in a repeated game between voters and a rent-seeking Leviathan government. Key insights...

We estimate the effects of active labour market policies (ALMP) on subsequent employment by nonparametric instrumental variables and matching estimators. Very informative administrative Swiss data with detailed regional information are combined with exogenous regional variation in programme...

In this paper, we use time-use surveys to examine trends in the allocation of time in five industrialized countries over the last thirty years. Adjusting for changing demographics, we find that leisure time across countries has converged over this period. Specifically, leisure time has declined...