This paper evaluates the impact of an antipoverty program on the health condition of individuals. The program combines a cash transfer with financial incentives for positive behavior to poor families. Its main purposes are to improve the living conditions of eligible households and to promote...

The goal of this paper is to provide alternative approaches to generate indexes in order to assess banking distress. Specifically, we focus on two groups of indexes that are based on the signalling approach and on the zero in ated Poisson models. The results show that the indexes based on these...

This paper assesses the relationship between the macroeconomic system and the banking sector by estimating two separate non-linear Vector Autoregressive models (VAR) for the US and Switzerland. The model specification includes the output gap, the interest rate, the in ation rate and a banking...

During the last financial crisis the Federal Reserve launched several extraordinary actions, including the creation of a number of new facilities for auctioning short-term credit, with the general aim of sustaining the financial sector and of ensuring adequate access to liquidity to financial...

This study provides a comprehensive, accurate and ready-to-use dataset on the relationships between the members of the Swiss Parliament and groups of interests. We capture politicians' linkages exploiting (1) their mandates in legal entities; (2) the enterprises, associations or other...

Using a unique dataset, based on the 49th Swiss legislature, we assess lobbying effect on politicians' votes. Counselors' ties are approximated by their mandates in in legal entities. Political representatives' fidelity to their political group is measured by a dummy proximity indicator. We find...

Using a unique data set based on US commercial banks and county level loan origination for the period 2005-2010, we measure whether banks that benefited from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) increase small business loan originations. We propose an identification strategy which exploits...

Using a unique bank-level dataset, we assess the impact of the Term Auction Facility program on bank liquidity risk. The change in the US housing price index at state levels between 2002:Q1 and 2006:Q3 is the exclusion restriction to control for potential selection bias. On average, TAF banks...