Customer markets are characterized by long-term relations between buyers and sellers. Long-term relations evolve if buyers trust sellers to provide high quality and if sellers are trustworthy. However, changes in the terms of this implicit contract may antagonize customers and disrupt the...

What causes a government to adopt a new program or policy? Despite a large number of empirical studies available to date, the relative importance of various determinants remains obscure because of difficulties of statistical identification. We present an experimental setting to study the...

Tax Liability Side Equivalence (tax LSE) claims that the statutory incidence of a tax is irrelevant for its economic incidence. In gift-exchange labor markets, firms provide a gift to workers by paying high wages, and workers reciprocate by providing high efforts. Tax LSE is theoretically...

This paper examines the power of a conditional difference-in-differences approach to nonparametrically identify the causal effects of sequences of interventions. In the classical difference-in-differences case, a period previous to the implementation of the intervention is used as a comparison...

I analyze the effect of unemployment on subsequent employment history for Switzerland. Using administrative panel data from the unemployment insurance system and the social security databases, I estimate a discrete time hazard model for the exit from the different labor market states:...

This paper examines whether European monetary union has lowered the degree of price dispersion among member countries. The difference-in-differences methodology is applied to four independent data sets containing prices of identical goods. While the results reported in the paper vary somewhat...

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,...

In recent years, venture capital has increasingly become a factor in the financing of new firms. We examine how the value of mature firms determines the incentives of entrepreneurs to start up new firms and of venture capitalists to finance and advise them. We examine how capital gains taxes as...

The integration of core labour standards into the WTO has been demanded mostly on ei-ther humanitarian or fair trade grounds. While both reasons can be justified theoretically, the case for integration remains unclear. Whereas the humanitarian integration of core la-bour standards is a question...

This paper discusses the role of public policy towards the venture capital industry. The model emphasizes four margins: supply of entrepreneurs due to career choice, entry of venture capital funds and search for investment opportunities, simultaneous entrepre-neurial effort and managerial advice...