In Switzerland, new bank insolvency legislation is under consideration. The article compares the proposed regulation with the rules that would be optimal from an economic point of view. Optimal rules are a compromise between value maximization and absolute priority on the one hand (ex post...

Tax compliance literature lacks empirical evidence regarding the effects of a tax amnesty on tax compliance. To measure the long run effects of an amnesty on compliance, experiments in Switzerland and Costa Rica were conducted. The results suggest that tax compliance raises significantly when...

The re-elections to the Swiss Federal Government ('Federal Council') have not been much studied so far. On the basis of the 1947-1999 record, we propose an econometric model of these re-elections, consisting of four identities and two equations, the first of the latter explaining the score of...

We examine the validity of real interest parity as a long run condition for the G7 countries. If real interest parity holds, differences of real interest rates are stationary. This is investigated by the means of conventional and panel unit root tests, where heterogeneity and contemporaneous...

Whether or not seniority has a substantial effect on wages has been the subject of much controversy. ALTONJI and SHAKOTKO (1987) and TOPEL (1991) have put forward different empirical strategies to deal with unobserved heterogeneity. Their methods yield different results for the U.S. labor...

We test the hypothesis of nonlinear adjustment towards the purchasing power parity as suggested by Dumas' (1992) model. We estimate a stable exponential smooth transition regression model (ESTAR) for the Swiss franc/German mark exchange rate over the 1960-1998 period, where the adjustment to the...

This paper analyses the potential employment effects of foreign direct investment in the Swiss services industry. First, the theoretical analysis considers the consequences on domestic employment resulting from the specific characteristics of services compared with those of industrial goods. It...

The need for better targeting of active labour market programmes is evident from the many evaluation studies that find insignificant or even negative effects. A statistical system could contribute to a more precise targeting of labour market programmes to those individuals who are likely to...

The challenge of rural landscape and water quality improvement is investigated as a problem of positive and negative externalities. Based on this analytical background, alternative policy measures are evaluated, and a charge-subsidy scheme with balanced budget is proposed as a cost-effective...

In this paper, the importance of money for the output development is analysed over the period from 1980 to 2000 for the euro area, where simple sum and Divisia monetary aggregates are used. Adapting an in-sample analysis, all real monetary aggregates help to explain the output gap of the euro...