European Integration and Switzerland: A Synthetic Control Analysis of Switzerland’s Trade Potential if Switzerland Had Joined the European Union
The objective of this paper is to investigate how Switzerland’s trade outcomes would have evolved had it decided to join the EU. Using the 1995 EU enlargement for identification, the synthetic control method is applied to construct a counterfactual scenario in which Switzerland joined the EU in 1995 together with Sweden, Finland, and Austria. Comparing the actual and the synthetic bilateral trade
