We compare the effectiveness of Federal Reserve's asset purchase programs in lowering longterm yields with that of similar programs implemented by the Bank of England, the Swedish Riksbank, and the Swiss National Bank's reserve expansion program. We decompose government bond yields into (i) an...

This paper examines the possible effects on Switzerland of asset preference shifts in favor of Swiss-franc-denominated assets that could result from EMU. Alternative policy responses to temporary and persistent asset preference shifts and the consequent pressures for exchange rate appreciation...

Event studies are used to analyze the impact of U.S. financial, fiscal, and monetary policies from US to foreign asset prices across a range of G20 countries and Switzerland. The initial announcement that the Administration supported tighter regulation of banks led to a generalized fall in...

Fabian Schnell develops a model indicating that by keeping real interest rates too low, monetary policy can distort the allocation of resources across firms and potentially delay economic recovery after a recession. This is a new channel of monetary policy that is especially relevant in view of...

Lukas Heim evaluates the performance of a price-level targeting rule compared to that of a standard inflation targeting rule. The comparison is based on a medium-scale DSGE model which has been estimated based on state-of-the-art Bayesian methods. The model for the Swiss economy is an expanded...