Inflation targeting has become the monetary policy framework of the nineties. At the other extreme, several central banks have recently adopted key elements of the inflation targeter's toolkit, but at the same time they have made formal declarations that they are not inflation targeters. Such a...

It is often argued that interventions provide news on changes in risk premia or in future monetary policy. If so, the timing of interventions offers important information for central bank watchers. One method to study the reaction function of a central bank is to consider whether the duration...

The objective of this note is to document the importance of improvements relative to the other forms of capital spending and to determine whether improvements have similar cyclical properties as maintenance and repair. To shed some light on these issues, we look at a unique data set on Swiss...

The timely release of macroeconomic data imposes a distinct structure on the panel: the clustering and sequential ordering of real and nominal variables. We call this orderly release of economic data sequential information flow. The ordered panel generates a new class of restrictions that are...

In this article, we demonstrate that a small degree of stochastic variation in the depreciation rate of capital can greatly reduce the comovement between hours worked and labour productivity in a neoclassical growth model. The depreciation rate is modeled as a Markov process to place a strict...

When labor abundant nations grow, their exports increase more in labor intensive than in capital intensive sectors. We utilize this difference in how exports are affected by growth to identify the causal effect of trade with low-income countries (LICs) on U.S. industry. Our framework relates...

This paper examines a special episode in communication practices of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) when short-term interest rates reached the zero bound. A particular feature of SNB communication policy at the time was to talk openly about alternative policy instruments despite the fact that they...

Survey information on Swiss exporters is used to test the hypothesis that firm-specific factors, in particular firm size, are important determinants of pricing--to-market (PTM). The survey asked exporters whether they set different prices across markets and, if so, whether price segmentation...

One test of an exchange-rate peg is to ask whether the implicit inflation target of the pegging country is the same as that of the anchor country. If the inflation targets of the two countries are different, the peg's long-run credibility should be rejected. We examine the Austrian experience...

Does global currency volume increase on days when the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meets? To test the hypothesis of excess currency volume on FOMC days, we use a novel data set from the Continuous Linked Settlement (CLS) Bank. The CLS measure captures roughly half of the global trading...