Was Swiss federal fiscal policy sustainable over the period from 1900 to 2002? We perform unit root and cointegration tests for federal revenues and expenditures, taking into account a structural shift related to World War II. We find sustainability over the entire period. However, splitting the...

Why do some countries join the EU earlier than others, why do others wait? In order to answer this question we apply the theory of investment under uncertainty (Dixit and Pindyck, 1994) to the decision on EU-membership. We develop a simplified model of two periods to study how the value of...

Based on a relative entropy approach, this paper proposes a method to estimate or update transition matrices using just cross-sectional observations at two points in time. The method is then applied to explain the development of the US income distribution. Starting from three hypothesized...

We investigate the performance of domestic and international bond and equity portfolios of Swiss pension funds and investment foundations over the period of 1996 to 2006. We find some indications for superior skills of pension funds in international bond management even net of costs for asset...

This paper examines the transmission of monetary policy in Switzerland using a structural vector error correction model (SVECM) that includes real money, real output, a long and short-term interest rate, inflation and the exchange rate as endogenous variables; and a foreign interest rate and oil...

Our paper investigates the geographical distribution of physicians across the Swiss cantons over the years 1960 to 2005. We use a physician location model relating physician growth in a canton related to (i) the existing number of physicians in an area, (ii) commonly used determinants of the...

In health care systems today, including those of Switzerland and the United States, participants do not necessarily see the big picture of lifetime health costs and quality of life, and in many systems consumers and providers lack the incentives to manage preventative and chronic care to...

In this paper, we analyze the prospective method of paying hospitals when the within-DRG variance is high. To avoid patients dumping, an outlier payment system is implemented. In the APDRG Swiss System, it consists in a mixture of fully prospective payments for low costs patients and partially...

In this paper we use discrete-time proportional hazard models with internationally comparable longitudinal data from the full eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) to study the relationship between retirement, health levels and health shocks in nine European countries. The...

The explanatory factors of individual healthcare consumption are studied by means of healthcare expenditures from the 2000–2005 Swiss Household Income and Expenditure Survey (SHIES). In order to tackle the issues of large number of null expenditures and skewed distribution of positive...