Low fertility rates combined with increases in early retirement pose a serious challenge to the sustainability of social security systems in most industrialized countries. Therefore, it is important for policy makers to understand the determinants of early retirement and especially the role that...

Swiss banking secrecy laws not only tempt foreign investors to remain silent about at least part of their capital incomes and, thus, not pay taxes as obliged by law. Therefore, Switzerland introduced a withholding tax on capital income in 1934, primarily in order to coerce domestic residents to...

We analyze a multi-country model in which a small group of countries adopts banking secrecy (BS) laws and a withholding tax. The other group doesn't. BS countries benefit in all relevant macroeconomic variables, including taxes and the provision of public goods. In non-BS countries most of the...

The paper addresses the issue of potentially endogenous control variables in evaluation studies based on the assumption that selection bias can be avoided by conditioning on observed variables. It shows that the standard formulation of the conditional independence (CIA) or selection on...