This cumulative dissertation consists of three essays. The first essays with the title ‘‘The Labor Market Effect of Opening the Border: Evidence from Switzerland’’ analyses the effect of opening the labor market for workers from the European Union in Switzerland after 1999. We exploit...

Der Umfang finanzieller Ressourcen ist für den Handlungsspielraum politischer Akteure konstitutiv, was auch für Bern im 16. Jahrhundert gilt. Orientiert an modernen finanzwissenschaftlichen Vorgaben wird in dieser Arbeit Struktur und Umfang des Berner Staatshaus-haltes analysiert und zwar so,...

The present dissertation focuses on trust and comprises three empirical essays on the concept itself and its foundations. All three essays investigate trust as an expectation and rely on selfreport measures of trust. Whereas the first two chapters investigate social trust, the third chapter...

Switzerland is a country with a strongly decentralized political system, based on federalism and institutions of direct democracy, on a liberal economic culture, and on a well-developed tradition of mutualism and social security (generous social expenditure and welfare system). Switzerland is...