The estimation of an ordered probit model for currency reforms trying to end 31 hyperinflations and three big inflations of the 20th century shows that the introduction of an independent central bank and the adoption of a credibly fixed exchange rate are crucial for the success of a currency...

This paper provides empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the secular price increase in the 16th century is mainly caused by money supply developments as the discovery of new mines in Latin America. First we review price developments for several European countries over the 16th...

This paper contributes to the debate about the puzzle of the Swiss Interest Rate Island. It starts out by establishing some stylized facts about the nature of the puzzle. First it shows that long run real returns on Swiss Euro Deposits have been significantly lower than in any other major...

This paper analyzes forward-looking rules for Swiss monetary policy in a small structural VAR consisting of four variables. First, the paper looks at the ex ante inflation-output-growth volatility trade-off for a forward-looking policy aiming at a convex combination of a strict inflation and...

We test the menu cost model of Ball and Mankiw (1994, 1995) on data from the inflation and deflation periods in Japan and Hong Kong. We calculate the moments of the distribution of price changes using a random split procedure to overcome the bias noted by Cecchetti and Bryan (1999). The key...

The analysis of a quarterly panel of ten countries covering 75 percent of the worldwide opera performances through the years 2014 to 2018 showed that the number of performances depend positively on growth and strongly negatively on unexpected inflation. Furthermore, highly significant country...

Ten years after the worst financial crisis of the post-war period, Switzerland has established a Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) framework. Under this framework, the two large Swiss banks are subject to substantial capital requirements. It is not obvious whether the TBTF capital requirements are...

This paper studies money demand in Switzerland under free banking before the establishment of the Swiss National Bank. We find that, in addition to income, the banks' balance-sheet-to-GDP ratio and the number of banks were important determinants of long-run money demand. The former variable also...

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,...