Monitoring Consumption Switzerland is a public-private partnership between the University of St. Gallen and the payment companies Worldline and SIX that processes and publishes payment data on transactions in Switzerland processed by Wordline/SIX in real time. This paper provides background...

We analyze drivers of the EUR/CHF exchange rate in different regimes between 2000 and 2020. Structural breaks between these subperiods are estimated in an integrated way together with the drivers that are relevant during these subperiods. Overall, the main drivers of the exchange rate include...

We document whether a simple, univariate model for quarterly GDP growth is able to deliver forecasts of yearly GDP growth in a crisis period like the Covid-19 pandemic, which may serve cross-checking forecasts obtained from elaborate and expert models used by forecasting institutions. We include...

This paper examines the short-run immigration effects on prices for owner-occupied housing and rents in Switzerland, exploiting regional variation at the level of 106 local labor markets ("Mobilité Spatiale" regions) and 26 cantons, respectively. We propose two empirical strategies that exploit...

Technologies evolve at different paces and their rate of improvement varies considerably. We demonstrate that the fastest technological progress currently occurs in the digital domain and empirically investigate the relationship between technologies' improvement rates and breakthrough...

We employ local projections to analyse the responses of Swiss asset prices to scheduled policy decisions of the European Central Bank (ECB) as a case study of ECB policy spillovers to European countries outside the euro area. Focusing on ECB policy shocks that are related to different policy...

This paper characterizes the relationship between monetary aggregates, inflation and economic activity in Switzerland since the mid-1970s. Traditional forms of money demand and quantity theory relationships have remained stable over the whole period. Broad money excesses over trend values,...

This article examines the spatially varying effect of age on single-family house (SFH) prices. Age has been shown to be a key driver for house depreciation and is usually associated with a negative price effect. In practice, however, there exist deviations from this behavior which are referred...

This paper empirically examines the economic effects of COVID-19 vaccine rollouts using a cross-country daily database of vaccinations and high-frequency indicators of economic activity - nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions, carbon monoxide (CO) emissions, and Google mobility indices - for a sample...

This paper analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on household income in Austria, using detailed administrative labor market data, in combination with micro-simulation techniques that enable specific labor market transitions to be modeled. We find that discretionary fiscal policy measures in...