Inflation targeting has become the monetary policy framework of the nineties. At the other extreme, several central banks have recently adopted key elements of the inflation targeter's toolkit, but at the same time they have made formal declarations that they are not inflation targeters. Such a...

One test of an exchange-rate peg is to ask whether the implicit inflation target of the pegging country is the same as that of the anchor country. If the inflation targets of the two countries are different, the peg's long-run credibility should be rejected. We examine the Austrian experience...

Merchanting is goods trade that does not cross the border of the firm's country of residence. Merchanting grew strongly in the last decade in several European economies and has become an important determinant of these countries' current account. Because merchanting firms reinvest their earnings...

This study seeks to determine if there were identifiable contrasts between the Austrian and Thai pegs that would have hinted at problems for Thailand prior to July 1997. The strategy is to first estimate a reaction function of a successful pegging country, i.e. Austria, to help identify salient...

This paper argues that exchange rate tensions delay future changes in the Fed's policy instrument, the federal funds rate. A shift in emphasis towards the exchange rate may conflict with the longer-term policy goals for the domestic economy. The Paper's objective is to consider empirically the...

Recent time-series evidence has reconfirmed the forecasting ability of Swiss broad money. The same money demand studies and others, however, find that the income elasticity is greater than one. Such parameter estimates are difficult to reconcile with transactions demand theory. This study...

The intra-daily efficacy of interventions by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) is examined for the 1986–94 period. The paper extends results from earlier studies because it uses the actual intervention exchange rates and all SNB interventions are known to the market. Our test of the signalling...

It is often argued that interventions provide news on changes in risk premia or in future monetary policy. If so, the timing of interventions offers important information for central bank watchers. One method to study the reaction function of a central bank is to consider whether the duration...

The objective of this note is to document the importance of improvements relative to the other forms of capital spending and to determine whether improvements have similar cyclical properties as maintenance and repair. To shed some light on these issues, we look at a unique data set on Swiss...

The timely release of macroeconomic data imposes a distinct structure on the panel: the clustering and sequential ordering of real and nominal variables. We call this orderly release of economic data sequential information flow. The ordered panel generates a new class of restrictions that are...