In this paper, I analyze the voting outcomes of two very similar Swiss referendum ballots concerning the federal governmentś competency to levy income, capital and turnover taxes to find out how the enfranchisement of women influences public support for government spending. The first ballot...

We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Council of States (Ständerat) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote,...

We use a change in the voting procedures of one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the voting behavior of its members. Until 2013, the Council of States (Ständerat) had voted by a show of hands. While publicly observable at the time of the vote,...

This paper studies the relation between the evolution of capital controls and electoral cycles. We exploit a dataset containing detailed information on the level of restrictions on capital flows for 98 countries on an annual base from 1995 to 2015, constructed by Fernandez et al. (2016). First,...

In this paper, I analyze the voting outcomes of two very similar Swiss referendum ballots concerning the federal government's competency to levy income, capital and turnover taxes to find out how the enfranchisement of women influences public support for government spending. The first ballot...

We study whether the number of signatures collected to qualify a popular initiative affects the probability of reforming the status quo. The initiative process is modeled as a sequential game under uncertainty: petitioners make an entry decision and collect signatures to qualify the initiative....

In this paper, I analyze the voting outcomes of two very similar Swiss referendum ballots concerning the federal government’s competency to levy income, capital and turnover taxes to find out how the enfranchisement of women influences public support for government spending. The first ballot...