On the basis of keyword searches in newspaper articles several versions of the Recession-word Index (RWI) are constructed for Germany and Switzerland. We use these indices in order to track the business cycle dynamics in these two countries. Our main findings are the following. First, we show...

In a pioneering attempt we present the R(ecession)-word index for Switzerland. We evaluate its predictive ability of GDP growth using real-time vintages of GDP data, closely simulating flow of information in the past. We find that inclusion of the R-word index led to statistically significant...

We examine the effects of negative news reporting on companies' self-assessment of their business situation. We compare survey data in the manufacturing sector in Switzerland with thousands of newspaper articles which we scan for particular keywords. Simple OLS regressions do not show a...

We examine the effects of negative economic news reporting on companies' self-assessment of their business situation. In order to measure this negativity effect, we introduce a new daily business indicator for the Swiss manufacturing sector and examine the influence of newspaper articles, which...

In most developed countries drugs are dispensed to patients through physicians and pharmacists. This paper studies the effects of allowing doctors to directly dispense drugs to patients (self-dispensation) on pharmaceutical coverage. We use a Swiss dataset in our empirical analysis because...

Uncertainty shapes the trajectory of business cycles and remains a central research topic in Macroeconomics. When studying the impact of uncertainty on the economy, economists use different uncertainty measures. While all indicators approximate uncertainty along some certain dimension, none of...

This study investigates the usefulness of the business tendency surveys collected at the KOF institute for short-term forecasting of employment in Switzerland aggregated in the KOF Employment Indicator. We use the real time dataset in order to simulate the actual predictive process using only...

This study evaluates forecasting performance of a large-scale factor model developed in Siliverstovs and Kholodilin (2012) in a genuine ex ante forecasting exercise. We perform our forecast of GDP growth in Switzerland in real time using real-time data vintages collected at weekly frequency....

In this study we suggest a chronology of the classical business cycle in Switzerland. To this end we use two approaches: the approach of Artis et al. (2004) and an approach based on Markov-switching models (Hamilton, 1989). Our results show that similar conclusions can be reached by applying the...

This study presents a model that delivers more accurate forecasts of the revised rather initial estimates of the quarterly GDP growth rate in Switzerland during the period of the recent financial crisis. The key explanation to our findings is that our model, capitalizing on the information...