Eichenberger Reiner

The institution of a single CEO (Chief Executive Officer) has significant weaknesses.The CEO's interests diverge from those of the owners and their representants as well as other top managers. Assigning so much power to a single person is r...

The challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted scientists from different fields to evaluate whether the use of immunity certificates would allow for a safer and faster return to normality. This policy has been recently implemen...

We designed and implemented a survey to capture what scientists from around the world think about immunity certification. Responses from 12,738 scientists were captured and their distribution was tabulated by participants in health science ...

Broadening democracy by lowering the voting age is on the politicalagenda in many democratic societies. Previous suffrage extensions suggest that there are systematic differences between what parliaments decide and what voters want with res...

A pandemic is not only a biological event and a public health disaster, but it alsogenerates impacts that are worth understan ding from a societal, historical, and cultural perspective. In this contribution, we argue that as the disease spr...

Universal suffrage is a core element for the functioning of democracy. However,with growing international mobility, an increasing share of the resident population has no suffrage. This paper analyzes the conditions under which domestic citi...

In 2003, the retirement age of Swiss construction workers was loweredfrom 65 to 60. This reform has been intended to improve their health. Our study shows the opposite outcome. The human capital theory suggests that investments in employees...

Die wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Erfolge der Schweiz werden oft auf zwei für sietypische politische Institutionen zurückgeführt: direkte Demokratie und Föderalismus. Wir vermuten, dass eine dritte, bisher weitgehend vernachlÃ...

Switzerland is known for its highly developed direct democracy. However, Swiss women were enfranchised at the federal level only in 1971 and in many cantons even later. We analyze the role of direct democracy in the delayed Swiss enfranchis...

The return on investments in human and social capital increases in their economic lifetime. Thus, personal, parental, and societal investments in the capacities of individuals take place when these persons are young. Interestingly, the comp...

Combining referendum results with parliamentary votes of proportionally-elected politicians ofthe Swiss Lower House of Parliament, Giger and Klüver (American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming) find that sectional and cause interest...

We analyze political representation of preferences of different income groups by matching referendum outcomes for low, middle,and high-income voters with individual legislators' decisions on identical policy proposals. Results indicate that...

Do politicians with a military background decide differently on military affairs? We investigate the informative institutional setting of the Swiss conscription army. Politicians who served in the military have a higher probability of accep...

We identify the impact of transparency in political decision -making on thequality of political representation with a difference- in-difference strategy. The quality of political representation is measured by observed divergence of parliame...

We compare the votes of parliamentary representatives and their constituents on a popular initiativethat directly aimed at weakening the separation of powers in 1922 in Switzerland. We analyze whether the strength of individual ties to the ...

What determines political candidates? election prospects? We match roll call votes of candidates forthe majority elected upper house of parliament who were previously in the lower house with revealed preferences of their constituency. There...

Electoral systems determine the role party affiliations play in politicalrepresentation. According to conventional expectations, politicians’ party affiliations should influence political representation when they are elected by proportion...

We analyze whether female or male members of parliament adhere moreclosely to citizens’ revealed preferences with quasi-experimental data. By matching individual representatives’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with real refere...

We match individual senators’ voting behavior on legislative proposals with 24real referenda decisions on exactly the same issues with identical wording. This setting allows us to evaluate the median voter model’s quality with revealed ...

In parliament, individual representatives vote with a certain probability according to theirconstituents’ preferences. Thus, the mechanism of the Condorcet Jury Theorem can be fruitfully applied to parliamentary representation: The probab...

We assess the effect of constituents’ preferences on legislators’ decisions within a quasiexperimental setting: In the Swiss referendum process, citizens and legislators reveal their preferences for legislative proposals. We match roll ...

Members of parliament have more effective incentives to cater for themajority?s preferences when they are elected in districts with few seats in parliament rather than in districts with many seats. We empirically investigate this hypothesis...

Public debts capitalize into property prices. Therefore, property owners tend to favor tax over debt financing for government spending. In contrast, tenants do not suffer from debt capitalization. Thus, they tend to favor debt over tax fina...

Scholars today are under increasing pressure to publish in A-journals, the main role of which consists in certifying that a paper meets traditional academic standards. Consequences of this pressure are multiple authorship, slicing of ideas ...

Rational individuals know that present government debts transform into higher future taxes. The Ricardian equivalence implies that the burden of the debt is not shifted between generations because of compensating intergenerational transfers...

Who is the best formula 1 driver? Until today it was impossible to answer this question because the observable performance of a driver depends both on his talent and the quality of his cars. In this paper we for the first time separate driv...

In the economic literature various political institutions designed to control the government have been analyzed. However, an important institution has been neglected so...

Democratic elections look very much like a contest where voters have to compare the candidates according to an ordinal ranking. Nevertheless, the theory of tournaments has not yet been applied to Political Economics. Therefore, we deploy to...