Recently, Abadie et al. (Am J Polit Sci 59:495-510, 2015) have expanded synthetic control methods by the so-called cross-validation technique. We find that their results are not being reproduced when alternative software packages are used or when the variables' ordering within the dataset is...

The topic of this paper has been motivated by the rising unemployment rate of low-skilled relative to high-skilled labour in Switzerland. Between 1991 and 2014, Switzerland experienced the highest relative increase in the low-skilled unemployment rate among all OECD countries. A natural culprit...

This paper examines interest-parity conditions that arguably held as regards the investment demand for bills of exchange during the classical gold standard (1880-1914). Contemporaneous guides to the foreign exchanges report that close connections between the exchange and discount rates arose...

We estimate the size of inheritance flows in Switzerland over a long span of data, in close analogy to the study for France by Piketty (Q J Econ 126(3):1071-1131, 2011). We find that inheritance flows had been growing more slowly than national income up until the 1970s, but have been outpacing...

Creative accounting allows governments and, more particularly, finance ministers to somehow manage financial reports to achieve specific and possibly self-interested goals. It is usually used to hide deficits. It sometimes also helps to present financial performance as being more worrisome than...

This paper analyzes the relationship between factor substitutability and the energy intensity of manufacturing firms. Specifically, we compare the degree of substitutability between the input factors capital, labor, energy, and material for firms with low, medium, and high energy cost shares...

The sovereign money initiative will be submitted to the Swiss people in 2018. This paper reviews the arguments behind the initiative and discusses its potential impact. I argue that several arguments are inconsistent with empirical evidence or with economic logic. In particular, controlling...

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...

Ten years after the worst financial crisis of the post-war period, Switzerland has established a Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) framework. Under this framework, the two large Swiss banks are subject to substantial capital requirements. It is not obvious whether the TBTF capital requirements are...

This article develops unbiased weighted variance and skewness estimators for overlapping return distributions. These estimators extend the variance estimation methods constructed in Bod et. al. (Applied Financial Economics 12:155-158, 2002) and Lo and MacKinlay (Review of Financial Studies...