Search Results
Journal Article
Open mouth operations: a Swiss case study
Working Paper
Immigrant language barriers and house prices
Are language skills important in explaining the nexus between house prices and immigrant inflows? The language barrier hypothesis says immigrants from a non common language country value amenities more than immigrants from common language countries.> ; In turn, immigrants from non common language countries are less price sensitive to house price changes than immigrants from a common language country. Tests of the language barrier hypothesis with Swiss house prices show that an immigration inflow from a non common language country equal to 1 percent of an area's population is coincident with ...
Working Paper
Identifying Austria's implicit monetary target: an alternative test of the "hard currency" policy
One simple test of the long-run viability of an exchange-rate peg, which complements tests based on market expectations, is to ask whether the implicit inflation target ofthe pegging country is the same as that of the anchor country. If the implicit inflation targets of the two countries are different, the peg's long-run credibility can be rejected. The implicit inflation target is defined as the policy-implied, trend rate of inflation. The proposed test is applied to the Austrian experience with a 'hard currency' policy aimed at targeting its exchange rate with the Deutsche mark.
Working Paper
Globalization and inflation in Europe
What is the impact of import competition from other low-wage countries (LWCs) on inflationary pressure in Western Europe? This paper seeks to understand whether labor-intensive exports from emerging Europe, Asia, and other global regions have a uniform impact on producer prices in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In a panel covering 110 (4-digit) NACE industries from 1995 to 2008, IV estimates predict that LWC import competition is associated with strong price effects. More specifically, when Chinese exporters capture 1 percent of European market share, producer prices ...
Working Paper
European hoarding: currency use among immigrants in Switzerland
Do immigrants have a higher demand for large denominated banknotes than natives? This study examines whether cash orders for CHF 1000 notes, a banknote not used for daily transactions, is concentrated in Swiss cities with a high foreign-to-native ratio. Controlling for a range of socio-economic indicators across 250 Swiss cities, European immigrants in Switzerland are found to hoard less CHF 1000 banknotes than natives. A 1 percent increase in the immigrant-to-native ratio leads to a reduction in currency orders by CHF 4000. This negative correlation between immigrant-to-native ratio and ...
Report
Shock identification of macroeconomic forecasts based on daily panels
This paper proposes a new procedure for shock identification of macroeconomic forecasts based on factor analysis. Our identification scheme for information shocks relies on data reduction techniques for daily panels and the recognition that macroeconomic releases exhibit a high level of clustering. A large number of data releases on a single day is of considerable practical interest not only for the estimation but also for the identification of the factor model. The clustering of cross-sectional information facilitates the interpretation of the forecast innovations as real or as nominal ...
Working Paper
Merchanting and current account balances
Merchanting is goods trade that does not cross the border of the firm's resident country. Merchanting grew strongly in the last decade in select small open economies and has become an important driver of these countries' current account. Because merchanting firms reinvest their earnings abroad to expand their international activities, this practice raises national savings in the home country without increasing domestic investment. This results in a significantly large current account surplus. To show the empirical links between merchanting and the current account, two exercises are performed ...
Working Paper
Fixing Swiss potholes: the importance of improvements
This note sheds new light on the dynamic properties of maintenance and repair and examines the behavior of an additional form of capital spending-that of improvements. The analysis examines a unique long-run data set on Swiss road spending.
Working Paper
Stochastic capital depreciation and the comovement of hours and productivity
An unresolved question concerning stochastic depreciation shocks is whether they have to be unrealistically large to have any useful role in a dynamic general equilibrium model economy, as Ambler and Paquet (1994) first suggested. We first consider implied depreciation rates from sectoral data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. These depreciation rates vary across time solely due to compositional changes within each sector. Hence, they tend to understate the range of fluctuation that would hold if the economic shelf life of capital varied endogenously as in Cooley, Greenwood and Yorukoglu ...
Working Paper
Inflation targeting in a small open economy: empirical results for Switzerland
This paper extends McCallum?s (1987) nominal targeting rule to a small open economy by allowing for feedback from the exchange rate. Instead of setting parameters in a McCallum-type targeting rule and simulating, the parameters are estimated using a markov switching model. We argue that a model of discrete parameter changes should be adept at capturing sudden changes in policy regime, such as changes in the degree to which monetary policy admits feedback from the exchange rate. We examine the legitimacy of an inflation targeting rule with occasional exchangerate feedback to describe Swiss ...