This paper analyzes how the size and composition of the balance sheet affects firms financing cost within a large panel of Swiss firms in the non-financial sector from 1998 to 2011. The data includes a large number of small firms, which makes the data representative. We use an instrumental...

This paper estimates the response of consumer prices to a monetary policy shock in Switzerland. We find that there is no evidence of a price puzzle at the aggregate level. This is because our factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) avoids misspecification by including more information...

To appropriately model the observed slow response of real variables to nominal shocks, macroeconomic models augment nominal with real rigidities. One very popular way of modelling such a real rigidity is to assume a non-constant demand elasticity. While there has been conducted ample empirical...

Using a large panel of quarterly firm survey data from 1984 to 2007, which allow changes in firms' prices to be linked to several firm-specific variables, this paper finds that state-dependent pricing is clearly important in a low inflation environment and that variables measuring the current...

This paper analyzes whether the educational and professional background of a head of government matters for the implementation of market-liberalizing reforms. Employing panel data over the period 1970-2002, we present empirical evidence based on a novel data set covering profession and education...

This paper analyzes European financial markets' comprehension and interpretation of ECB communication signals. By applying a novel indicator developed by Berger et al. (2006), that quantifies the contents of the ECB's introductory statements, we find that communication affects the term structure...

Official statistics measuring the cost of living are known to suffer from several biases because they often do not accurately capture substitution patterns, product entry/exit, and preference shifts. In particular, the latter two biases have been shown to be large on average. This paper shows...

Recent literature suggests that news shocks could be an important driver of economic cycles. In this article, we use a direct measure of news sentiment derived from media reports. This allows us to examine whether innovations in the reporting tone correlate with changes in the assessment and...

Using online data for prices and real-time debit card transaction data on changes in expenditures for Switzerland allows us to track inflation on a daily basis. While the daily price index fluctuates around the official price index in normal times, it drops immediately after the lockdown related...

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...