This paper explores the impact of contactless payment on consumers' demand for cash at an early stage of diffusion. The specific devices that are investigated are debit and credit cards, in which the feature is embedded. A novel balanced panel dataset drawn from representative surveys on...

Because macroeconomic data is published with a substantial delay, assessing the health of the economy during the rapidly evolving COVID-19 crisis is challenging. We develop a fever curve for the Swiss economy using publicly available daily financial market and news data. The indicator can be...

The partial shutdown of the economy following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of measurements of economic activity that are available with a short lag and at high frequency. The consumption of electricity turns out to be a valuable proxy, if it is corrected for...

We examine the impact of the trans fat ban on a variety of public health outcomes. To this end, we consider a de facto trans fat ban that was introduced by Denmark in 2001. Using the synthetic control method, parallel trends between Denmark and countries in a control group in the years prior to...

We analyse small businesses' recourse to public support measures during the COVID-19 crisis using a survey of 1011 self-employed workers and small business owners in Switzerland. We find that "objective" measures of lockdown affectedness and economic structure explain fairly well how businesses...

This paper sheds light on Swiss franc LIBOR futures, which are often used to derive interest rate expectations. We show that the differences between LIBOR futures and realized rates (excess returns) are, on average, positive over the last 25 years. Using interest rate surveys, we decompose...

I assess the stability of the monetary environment in Switzerland over the past two centuries. In order to control for transitory measurement errors, in particular in nineteenth century data, I use an unobserved-components stochastic-volatility model to extract the permanent trends from several...

The rise in the level of executive compensation in international banking in the last two decades has been striking. At the same time, corporate declarations of relative performance evaluation (RPE) have enjoyed widespread popularity. RPE determines the level of CEO pay by accounting for common...

We study the reaction of the CHF and JPY to macroeconomic surprises and changes in the broader market environment before and during the crisis using high-frequency data. Results show that the CHF and JPY are traditionally more sensitive to macroeconomic surprises than other currencies,...

This paper addresses the question of the optimal debt level of a state (canton) that issues new bonds and subsequently invests the borrowed capital. For that purpose, we first estimate the effect of the debt level on the interest rate and then we contrast the predicted interest rate with...