In Switzerland, transportation represents 41% of CO2 emissions from energy combustion (2016), a much higher share than in the European Union (EU) (28%) or even the USA (34%). While total Swiss CO2 emissions decreased by 10% between 1990 and 2016, CO2 emissions from transport increased by 4.5%...

Swiss targets for climate policy require significant reductions of emissions by 2050. While such reductions can be achieved in a cost-efficient manner by employing taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, such taxes tend to lead to a regressive distribution of policy cost among households. To...

Collaborating under the Swiss Energy Modeling Platform (SEMP), five modeling teams (employing an energy systems model and four macroeconomic models with a focus on energy) have carried out a multi-model comparison to assess the economic and technological consequences of reaching emission...

This paper is a contribution to assessing the Swiss energy transition, with an emphasis on the consequences of decommissioning the nuclear power plants for the electricity market and the whole economy. We expect that increased renewable generation and demand-side policies of the type already...

Knowing the part of currency in circulation that is used for transactions is important information for a central bank. For several countries, the share of banknotes that is hoarded or circulates abroad is sizeable, which may be particularly relevant for large-denomination banknotes. We analyze...

This paper analyzes the Confederation's debt management. The Confederation actively manages roll over and interest rate risk by increasing bond maturity with increasing marketable debt-to-GDP levels. It further engages in active but asymmetric, one-sided interest rate positioning; i.e., it uses...

In the face of recent refugee migration, early integration of asylum seekers into the labor market has been proposed as an important mechanism for easing their economic and social lot in the short as well as in the long term. However, little is known about the policies that foster or hamper...

Motivated by recent US evidence, we evaluate the predictive power of changes in the weight of large firms in the aggregate stock market ("Goliath vs David" (GVD)) for Swiss stock market returns and bond market returns. Previous research suggests that the asset return dynamics in the US and...

The U.S. Tax Program for Swiss banks is a very significant part of the recent history of the Swiss financial industry. It has accelerated the transformation of the Swiss banking industry from a system that relied on bank secrecy to a much more compliant one. It was also rather costly for the...