The paper empirically analyzes whether electoral rules make legislators differently responsive to changes in fiscal incentives. Key to the analysis are two unique reforms in the German state of Lower Saxony which changed (i) the municipal charter by replacing the council-manager system...

Conventional wisdom has it that proportional representation leads to more coalition governments and so to greater government spending, especially in redistributive categories favoured by special-interest groups. In contrast, we show in a theoretical model that first-past-the-post systems of...

In response to the increasing international pressure on Switzerland to reform the ring-fenced elements in its tax system, the Swiss Government has put forward a comprehensive tax reform package. The proposal comprises, among other things, the introduction of a licence box, a substantial...

Switzerland is a prime location for both domestically owned as well as foreign-owned multinational enterprises (MNEs). In this paper, we review the literature on MNE activity with respect to its main fundamental (non-policy) drivers, the non-fiscal consequences of MNEs for various economic...

The paper analyzes the efficiency costs of dividend taxation in an effort-based corporate agency model in which non-verifiable managerial effort enhances taxable profits. We show that investment changes following a rise in dividend taxes might not be sufficient to infer the efficiency cost of...

In this paper, we study how local border reforms affect economic activity. To do so, we make use of large-scale municipal merger reforms in Germany to assess the effect of local border changes on the distribution of activity in space, an issue that has not been addressed in existing literature....

Recent empirical research documents a tendency of affiliates of multinational enterprises to bunch around zero reported profit. Setting up a model that allows for profitable and loss-making affiliates of multinationals, we show that profit shifting to a low-tax country as well as a loss-related,...

Gemäss den definitiven Zahlen wuchsen die gesamten nominalen Gesundheitsausgaben im Jahr 2016 mit 3.7% und somit marginal langsamer als gemäss dem Datenstand vom Frühling. Da das Bruttoinlandprodukt (BIP) jedoch deutlich langsamer wuchs, erhöhte sich das Verhältnis zum BIP erneut und betrug...

Gemäss den vorläufigen Zahlen nahmen die gesamten nominalen Gesundheitsausgaben im Jahr 2017 um 2.6% zu und somit weniger stark als in den Vorjahren. Da das Bruttoinlandprodukt (BIP) jedoch ebenfalls deutlich langsamer wuchs, erhöhte sich das Verhältnis der Gesundheitsausgaben zum BIP erneut...