We study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated government measures on individual mobility choices in Switzerland. Our data is based on over 1,600 people for which we observe all trips during eight weeks before the pandemic and until May 2021. We find an overall reduction of...

In this paper we develop a framework to value public investments with the purpose of increasing bicycling that explicitly accounts internal costs of bicycling, which are typically neglected in current established approaches that value bicycle spending by means of gross health benefits alone, as...

We analyze the strategic interaction of regional and federal governments using a model that includes fiscal externalities in the form of inter-regional capital tax competition and technical externalities in the form of inter-regional spillovers. The federal government aims to correct for these...

We investigate the social value of medical interventions at the end of life that tend to have a high cost-benefit ratio. We model the optimal allocation of health resources across a continuum of diseases that dier by severity and treatment options, and extend it to allow for learning spillovers...

We investigate the effect of multiple flood events on property prices in Zurich canton of Switzerland. By merging property transaction data with records from universal and mandatory building insurance, we are able to identify the effect of the informational content of floods separately from the...

The use of price instruments is often advocated by economists, based on their ability to bring about marginal abatement cost equalisation, and hence to achieve targets at least cost. We use the EU ETS as a case study and test this theoretical prediction. We parametrically estimate separate...

We investigate productivity and cost pass-through of German manufacturing firms using administrative data from 2001 to 2014. Our framework allows for the estimation of quantity-based production functions for multi-product firms while controlling for unobserved productivity shocks and unobserved...

Swiss climate policy consists of three regulatory instruments for greenhouse gas emissions reduction: A CO 2 levy, the Swiss Emissions Trading System (CH EHS), and an additional nonEHS" program for medium-sized plants that consists of command-and-control elements plus a sizeable abatement...

We develop a model of Tiebout sorting based on decentralized income taxation, which allows for spillovers and imperfect rivalry in consumption of the publicly provided good. We identify three sources of welfare loss from decentralization: Imperfect redistribution, inter-jurisdictional...

We study the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated government measures on individual mobility choices in Switzerland. Our data is based on over 1,000 people for which we observe all trips during eight weeks before the pandemic and again for up to 6 months after its onset. We find an...