This paper analyses the EEA and bilateral agreements vote results at the 3025 community level of the Swiss Confederation by simultaneously modelling the vote and the participation decisions. Regressions include economic and political factors. The economic variables are the aggregated shares of...

This paper documents some stylized facts about the Canadian financial structure. I explore these empirical facts in the context of the Canadian financial legislation. I find that, over the 1990s, Canadian businesses became more heavily dependent on financial markets as their primary source of...

The effectiveness of a central bank's monetary policy depends on the incentives of its head and board members to pursue an efficient policy in the citizens interest. Today, however, these incentives are weakened by three kinds of regulations. First, in almost all countries, only nationals may be...

This paper investigates the relative influences of industrial and country factors in international stock returns. Until very recently, academic research has consistently found that country factors dominate industrial factors. This result is in contradiction with practitioners beliefs. This paper...

This paper analyzes the likely economic consequences of a specific proposal for corporate income tax reform in Switzerland that is based on the recent ERU (2001) report. The proposal includes a partial dividend tax relief, more effective taxation of capital gains, and a property tax reduction,...

We consider a financially constrained multinational corporation with investment projects in both an industrial and a developing country. Since the collateral values of the projects' tangible assets diverge, the willingness of banks to grant a loan depends not only on the firm's financial wealth...

This paper compares and extends the tax competition analysis of ZODROW and MIESZKOWSKI (1986) and OATES and SCHWAB (1991, 1988). In a dynamic model of a small open economy we show that the efficiency of the tax instruments used to finance productive infrastructure depends on technical properties...

We use the event-study methodology to analyze the effectiveness of the foreign exchange market interventions conducted by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) during the period from 1986 through 1995. We measure the effectiveness of the interventions of the SNB in terms of their effect on exchange rate...