The removal of the lower bound on the EUR/CHF exchange rate in January 2015 provides a unique setting to study the implications of a large and sudden appreciation in an otherwise stable macroeconomic environment. Using transaction-level data on non-durable goods purchases by Swiss consumers, we...

This paper explores the robustness of the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) hypothesis. We analyze a panel of OECD countries from 1970 to 2008 and compare three different datasets on sectoral productivity, including a newly constructed database on total factor productivity. Overall, our DOLS estimation...

The Swiss National Bank's (SNB) elimination of the lower bound on the EUR/CHF exchange rate on January 15 2015 provides a unique setting to study how prices and quantities respond to changes in nominal exchange rates. In this paper, we complement the study of imports in Auer et al. (2020) by...

This paper develops a 9-dimensional SVAR to investigate the sources of the U.S. business cycle. We extend the standard set of identified shocks to include unexpected changes in commodity prices. Our main result is that commodity price shocks are a very important driving force of macroeconomic...