The output gap plays an important role in the assessment and conduct of monetary policy. Most of the current literature, however, relies on filtering procedures which use ad hoc smoothness arguments for identification. Furthermore, they are subject to end-of-sample problems and do not provide...

What drives the output gap? Contrary to standard agnostic statistical approaches, New Keynesian small open economy models allow decomposing the output gap into its shocks and confirm the conventional wisdom that most of the variation is due to foreign shocks. However, the risk premium shock also...

We construct a quarterly time series for nominal hourly wages and unit labour costs from 1975 onwards and investigate the empirical link between wages and CPI inflation in order to identify causality effects and assess the relevance of wages as an indicator for short-run price changes. We find...

Accessibility of real-time data is crucial for applied macroeconomic researchers who aim at evaluating forecasts, policy decisions or the accuracy of initial data estimates. To the extent of our knowledge, no appropriate and comprehensive real-time data set has been published for Switzerland so...

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,...

A New Keynesian DSGE model with non-Ricardian households is estimated for the Portuguese economy and the stability of the model’s prediction (posterior distributions, impulse responses, and sources of fluctuations in endogenous variables) tested under different assumptions on non-Ricardian...

By January 1, 2005, Switzerland reduced the legal level of blood–alcohol concentration while driving from 0.8h to 0.5h. This happend on basis of the assumptions that more restrictive per mil levels increase road safety. The benefit of lower blood–alcohol levels, however, depends on whether...

Based on a relative entropy approach, this paper proposes a method to estimate or update transition matrices using just cross-sectional observations at two points in time. The method is then applied to explain the development of the US income distribution. Starting from three hypothesized...