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...

Politico-economic analyses of democratic governance neglect the influence of independent audit institutions. While it is almost impossible to investigate their effect in a crosscountry design, we focus at the Swiss local level where audit courts play an important role. We collect cross-cantonal...

This short paper investigates the impact of Swiss economists by analyzing the citations collected in the Social Sciences Citation Index. It comes as no big surprise that the Anglo- Saxon countries dominate modern economics with respect to the absolute number of eminent, most frequently cited...