Contingent convertible capital instruments (CoCos) are hybrid capital securities that absorb losses when the capital of the issuing bank falls below a certain level. In this article, we go over the structure of CoCos, trace the evolution of their issuance, and examine their pricing in primary...

This paper provides novel evidence on the role of income taxes for residential rents and spatial sorting. Drawing on comprehensive apartment-level data, we identify the eff ects of tax diff erentials across municipal boundaries in Switzerland. The boundary discontinuity design (BDD) corrects for...

We estimate the causal effect of immigration on the labor market outcomes of resident employees in Switzerland, whose foreign labor force has increased by 32.8% in the last decade. To address endogeneity of immigration into different labor market cells, we develop new variants of the shift-share...

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where in the...

We investigate the effect of Reformed Protestantism, relative to Catholicism, on preferences for leisure, and for redistribution and intervention in the economy. We use a Fuzzy Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design to exploit a historical quasi-experiment in Western Switzerland, where in the...

The divergence of growth and inflation rates across EMU in recent years has reignited the debate as to whether Europe is really an "optimum currency area" in which monetary union yields net benefits. But answering this question is complicated inter alia by the further controversy over whether...