Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics最新文献

Ten years after the worst financial crisis of the post-war period, Switzerland has established a Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) framework. Under this framework, the two large Swiss banks are subject to substantial capital requirements. It is not obvious whether the TBTF capital requirements are sufficient to prevent banks from plunging the country into a financial crisis once again. We estimate the social costs and benefits of higher capital requirements for the two large Swiss banks and derive socially optimal capital ratios from the cost-benefit trade-off. Our results show that Swiss TBTF capital requirements still fall short of socially optimal capital ratios.

This paper analyzes the connection between openness and economic performance in Switzerland. Considering different dimensions of openness, we show that the Swiss economy is classified as relatively open. Nevertheless, there still is potential to further increase international integration, particularly through deregulation in the services sector. We also show that for some branches in the Swiss manufacturing sector, increases in international trade are associated with higher productivity in the long run. With regard to financial openness, we show that in the aftermath of the financial crisis, Switzerland mainly suffered from capital retrenchment. Foreign capital inflows were of minor importance. Short-run costs due to high volatility of capital flows might therefore be lower than widely perceived.

We estimate the size of inheritance flows in Switzerland over a long span of data, in close analogy to the study for France by Piketty (Q J Econ 126(3):1071-1131, 2011). We find that inheritance flows had been growing more slowly than national income up until the 1970s, but have been outpacing income growth since. According to our central estimates, the annual flow of inheritance amounted to 13.2% of national income in 2011. The share of total wealth that is attributable to inheritance has remained relatively stable over time, fluctuating between 45 and 60%.

In many contexts we may be interested in understanding whether direct connections between agents, such as declared friendships in a classroom or family links in a rural village, affect their outcomes. In this paper, we review the literature studying econometric methods for the analysis of linear models of social effects, a class that includes the 'linear-in-means' local average model, the local aggregate model, and models where network statistics affect outcomes. We provide an overview of the underlying theoretical models, before discussing conditions for identification using observational and experimental/quasi-experimental data.

This paper examines interest-parity conditions that arguably held as regards the investment demand for bills of exchange during the classical gold standard (1880-1914). Contemporaneous guides to the foreign exchanges report that close connections between the exchange and discount rates arose mainly with bills traded in London and the major financial centres on the European continent. As implied by the interest-parity condition, and in particular when future exchange-rate movements were covered by a suitable long-bill transaction, weekly data do suggest that between Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, and London, the return from discounting bills of exchange in the local money market was roughly equivalent to the return from investing in foreign currency bills.