This article aims at analyzing positive external effects in the arts and culture sector. Politicians often use these externalities as a reason for public (lump sum) subsidies for cultural institutions. This paper tries to internalize these positive externalities of the arts and culture sector by...

Today there is a broad consensus that price stability must be the primary goal of a central bank. At the same time, opinions differ on the desirable degree of price stability and on how this goal is to be achieved. In Switzerland, as elsewhere, money supply policy has lost much of its...

Two strains of literature have come out of the research addressing the size and duration of the United States federal government budget deficit. The first, focusing on budget control, deals with causality issues between expenditures and revenues. The second addresses the sustainability of the...

The article analyses the options in designing electronic trading systems and some of their potential effects on Investors and Intermediaries. The fundamental parameters in trading system design are being analysed and some essential concepts are being discussed from an economic perspective. In...

The economic theory of harvesting single-species systems is already well developed. The economic analysis of ecologically interdependent systems, however, is still in its infancy. Endogenizing a second species leads to quite complex model structures, which can only in part be resolved...

The paper looks at the empirical relationship between central bank independence (CBI) and income losses caused by restrictive monetary policy. It finds that higher CBI goes along with higher sacrifice ratios. This relationship is strongly nonlinear (differences at high CBI levels matter much...

In this paper I tried to show that the economic arguments in support of reserve requirements are not strong. Reserve requirements were long regarded as an essential instrument for the control of the money supply and the ultimate target variables of monetary policy. However, a substantial body of...

Throughout the twentieth century, the gap between the life expectancy of men and women in Switzerland has constantly widened. This gender-dependent increase in longevity causes an imbalance in numbers, particularly in the older age groups. The purpose of this study is to estimate, on the basis...

This paper applies theories of industrial organisation explaining the motives for vertical and horizontal integration to shed some light on the relationship between home and foreign production of multinational firms (MNEs). It is argued that once the preconditions for the existence of MNEs are...

The author develops global indexes of the progressivity and the redistributive effects of taxes and transfers, based on Lorenz curves and Gini indexes. He simulates the introduction in Switzerland of a regressive VAT with a 15% tax rate, in the context of the existing progressive federal income...