This paper studies the growth impacts of realizing two long-term carbon targets in Switzerland (reducing CO2 emissions in 2050 by 72% and 80% relative to 1990 levels) with alternative steering-based climate policies that include a uniform tax on the whole economy and differentiated tax schemes....

Swiss targets for climate policy require significant reductions of emissions by 2050. While such reductions can be achieved in a cost-efficient manner by employing taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, such taxes tend to lead to a regressive distribution of policy cost among households. To...

In the framework of a Bayesian structural dynamic factor model, we analyze how aggregate shocks affect the full set of production sectors in the Swiss economy. Our approach proves to be useful to cope with the large data set and at the same time allows us to consistently identify fundamental...

This paper studies the transmission of changes in short-term interest rates to longer-term government bond yields when interest rates are at very low levels or negative. We focus on Switzerland, where short-term interest rates have been at zero since late 2008 and negative since the beginning of...

Fuelled by federal stimuli of 440 million Swiss francs, the staggered expansion of childcare in many cantons allows the evaluation of this family policy on female labour supply. With new cantonal data, this study analyses both the decision to participate in the labour market and the intensity of...

The sovereign money initiative will be submitted to the Swiss people in 2018. This paper reviews the arguments behind the initiative and discusses its potential impact. I argue that several arguments are inconsistent with empirical evidence or with economic logic. In particular, controlling...