Second-homes represent a very peculiar reality for the tourism market, particularly in Switzerland in which this segment has a long tradition and represents an important share in the accommodation sector. Very few studies took into account the intention of second-home owners to permanently move...

In this paper I investigate whether changes in the availability of direct democratic institutions in local Swiss jurisdictions affect expenditure decentralization. By using a panel-based difference in differences estimation I find a statistically significant reduction in decentralization when...

To fully understand governance and authority in the large corporation, one must attend to politics. Because basic dimensions of corporate organization can affect the interests of voters, because powerful concentrated interest groups seek particular outcomes that deeply affect large corporations,...

We investigate the causal effect of retirement on health and cognitive abilities by exploiting the variation between and within European countries in old age retirement rules. We show negative and significant effect of retirement on both health and cognitive abilities. We also show evidence of...

This paper empirically investigates the underlying determinants of expenditure decentralization, based on the predictions of a new political economy model of partial decentralization. The analysis is based on an agency model, in which two levels of government are involved in the provision of a...

The global financial crisis and the European debt crisis have loomed large over the globe, with severe consequences on government finances in many countries. Switzerland has fared relatively well throughout this crisis. In this paper, surveying a selection of empirical research on Switzerland,...

This paper evaluates the causal negative effect of environmental tobacco exposure on health by exploiting the time and geographical variation in public-place smoking bans implemented in Switzerland between 2007 and 2011. Using monthly data from the universe of Swiss hospitals between 2004 and...

One of the main contributions of Ronald H. Coase was to demonstrate how mainstream economics was based on a contradictory amalgam of costly physical inputs and free institutional resources, and to gave origin the economics of institutions: each institution is a mode of allocation and...

The emergence of old-age social security has been linked to general fertility decline, and in recent years pension reforms have emerged as a response to the challenges of population ageing, in turn partially a consequence of fertility decline. Understanding the link between social security and...

The identification of strategic interactions among local governments is typically plagued by endogeneity problems. This paper proposes an identification strategy that makes use of a multi-tier federal system. State-level fiscal reforms provide an arguably exogenous source of variation in tax...