Articles

Saving lives during the COVID-19 pandemic: the benefits of the first Swiss lockdown

The implementation of a lockdown to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a strong economic and political debate in several countries. This makes it crucial to shed light on the actual benefit...

Authors: Nicolò Gatti and Beatrice Retali

Strategic deviations in optimal monetary policy

This paper investigates the circumstances under which a central bank is more or less likely to deviate from the optimal monetary policy rule. The research question is addressed in a simple New Keynesian dynami...

Authors: Fabio Canetg

Firms’ participation in the Swiss COVID-19 loan programme

This paper analyses the determinants of firm participation in the Swiss COVID-19 loan programme, which aims to bridge firms’ liquidity shortfalls that have resulted from the pandemic. State-guaranteed COVID-19...

Authors: Lucas Marc Fuhrer, Marc-Antoine Ramelet and Jörn Tenhofen

Back to work: the effect of a long-term career interruption on subsequent wages in Switzerland

This paper measures the effect of a long-term career interruption on wages after re-employment. Using data from the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) and a fixed effects estimation method allows us to account for ti...

Authors: Amélie Speiser

Swiss trade during the COVID-19 pandemic: an early appraisal

This study uses trade data from Switzerland’s Federal Customs Administration to examine the impact of Covid-19 on international goods trade between January and July 2020. We show that Swiss trade during that peri...

Authors: Konstantin Büchel, Stefan Legge, Vincent Pochon and Philipp Wegmüller

The effect of an electricity tax on aggregate electricity consumption: evidence from Basel

We estimate the effect of an electricity tax on aggregate electricity consumption with the synthetic control method. The tax was introduced in the Swiss city of Basel in 1999 and, together with other tariff ch...

Authors: Benjamin Krebs and Simon Luechinger

Minimum wage regulation in Switzerland: survey evidence for restaurants in the canton of Neuchâtel

This paper provides a first set of results on the impact of minimum wage regulation in Switzerland. We study the effects of an unexpected Supreme Court ruling mandating the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel to enforce...

Authors: Marius Berger and Bruno Lanz

Augmented wealth in Switzerland: the influence of pension wealth on wealth inequality

Entitlements for social security and occupational pensions present a major wealth component and play a central role for financial security. However, most individual-level data lacks information on pension weal...

Authors: Ursina Kuhn

Tracking inflation on a daily basis

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 th...

Authors: Santiago E. Alvarez and Sarah M. Lein

How the provision of childcare affects attitudes towards maternal employment

Do childcare institutions affect gender norms of individuals? I examine the introduction of childcare services and their impact on voters’ support of policies promoting maternal employment. I address the inher...

Authors: Anja Roth

The impact of human capital efficiency on Latin American mutual funds during Covid-19 outbreak

The mutual funds’ returns, inter alia, are dependent on fund managers’ performance. This makes human capital efficiency very central for consistent risk-adjusted performance. The persistence in performance bec...

Authors: Nawazish Mirza, Jamila Abaidi Hasnaoui, Bushra Naqvi and Syed Kumail Abbas Rizvi

COVID-19 financial support to small businesses in Switzerland: evaluation and outlook

We analyse small businesses’ recourse to public support measures during the COVID-19 crisis using a survey of 1011 self-employed workers and small business owners in Switzerland. We find that “objective” measu...

Authors: Marius Brülhart, Rafael Lalive, Tobias Lehmann and Michael Siegenthaler

COVID-19 and regional shifts in Swiss retail payments

This paper analyzes card payments to the retail sector in Switzerland during the COVID-19 crisis. We provide evidence on aggregate effects and regional shifts. Pronounced shifts—which persisted post-lockdown—c...

Authors: Sébastien Kraenzlin, Christoph Meyer and Thomas Nellen

Weighting bias and inflation in the time of COVID-19: evidence from Swiss transaction data

Sharp changes in consumer expenditure may bias inflation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using public data from debit card transactions, I quantify these changes in consumer spending, update CPI basket weights a...

Authors: Pascal Seiler

COVID-19 outbreak and beyond: the information content of registered short-time workers for GDP now- and forecasting

The number of short-time workers from January to April 2020 is used to now- and forecast quarterly GDP growth. We purge the monthly log level series from the systematic component to extract unexpected changes ...

Authors: Sylvia Kaufmann

A lockdown index to assess the economic impact of the coronavirus

Like most countries, the Swiss government adopted drastic measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus. These measures were aimed at avoiding close physical proximity between people. The adverse economic con...

Authors: Marius Faber, Andrea Ghisletta and Kurt Schmidheiny

Timing matters: the impact of response measures on COVID-19-related hospitalization and death rates in Germany and Switzerland

We assess the impact of the timing of lockdown measures implemented in Germany and Switzerland on cumulative COVID-19-related hospitalization and death rates. Our analysis exploits the fact that the epidemic w...

Authors: Martin Huber and Henrika Langen

Mobility and sales activity during the Corona crisis: daily indicators for Switzerland

This paper documents daily compound indicators on physical mobility and sales activity in Switzerland during the Corona crisis. We report several insights from these indicators: The Swiss population substantia...

Authors: Florian Eckert and Heiner Mikosch

Unemployment in Switzerland in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic: an intertemporal perspective

The following contribution compares the unemployment situation arising from the lockdown induced by the Covid-19 pandemic with previous employment crises in Switzerland. In addition, it forecasts the future tr...

Authors: George Sheldon

Blacking out

The partial shutdown of the economy following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of measurements of economic activity that are available with a short lag and at high frequency. The ...

Authors: Yvan Lengwiler

A daily fever curve for the Swiss economy

Because macroeconomic data is published with a substantial delay, assessing the health of the economy during the rapidly evolving COVID-19 crisis is challenging. We develop a fever curve for the Swiss economy ...

Authors: Marc Burri and Daniel Kaufmann

The impact of contactless payment on cash usage at an early stage of diffusion

This paper explores the impact of contactless payment on consumers’ demand for cash at an early stage of diffusion. The specific devices that are investigated are debit and credit cards, in which the feature i...

Authors: Tobias Trütsch

Does a ban on trans fats improve public health: synthetic control evidence from Denmark

We examine the impact of the trans fat ban on a variety of public health outcomes. To this end, we consider a de facto trans fat ban that was introduced by Denmark in 2001. Using the synthetic control method, ...

Authors: Rok Spruk and Mitja Kovac

Are apprenticeships business cycle proof?

Although there is evidence that apprenticeship training can ease the transition of youth into the labour market and thereby alleviate youth unemployment, many policymakers fear that firms will reduce the numbe...

Authors: Samuel Lüthi and Stefan C. Wolter

The term structure, leading indicators, and recessions: evidence from Switzerland, 1974–2017

This paper studies the predictive power for recessions of the slope of the Swiss term structure using monthly data for 1974–2017. Dynamic probit models indicate that the term structure contains information use...

Authors: Rebecca Stuart

Real-financial connectedness in the Swiss economy

We study macro-financial linkages and their importance within the Swiss economy from a network perspective. First, we investigate the real-financial connectedness in the Swiss economy, using the KOF economic b...

Authors: Erhan Uluceviz and Kamil Yilmaz

Are asylum seekers more likely to work with more inclusive labor market access regulations?

In the face of recent refugee migration, early integration of asylum seekers into the labor market has been proposed as an important mechanism for easing their economic and social lot in the short as well as i...

Authors: Michaela Slotwinski, Alois Stutzer and Roman Uhlig

What Goliaths and Davids among Swiss firms tell us about expected returns on Swiss asset markets

Motivated by recent US evidence, we evaluate the predictive power of changes in the weight of large firms in the aggregate stock market (“Goliath vs David” (GVD)) for Swiss stock market returns and bond market...

Authors: David R. Haab and Thomas Nitschka

Welfare effects of technology-based climate policies in liberalized electricity markets: seeing beyond total system cost

This paper is a contribution to assessing the Swiss energy transition, with an emphasis on the consequences of decommissioning the nuclear power plants for the electricity market and the whole economy. We expe...

Authors: Sophie Maire, Philippe Thalmann and Frank Vöhringer

Multi-model comparison of Swiss decarbonization scenarios

Collaborating under the Swiss Energy Modeling Platform (SEMP), five modeling teams (employing an energy systems model and four macroeconomic models with a focus on energy) have carried out a multi-model compar...

Authors: Florian Landis, Adriana Marcucci, Sebastian Rausch, Ramachandran Kannan and Lucas Bretschger

Cost distribution and equity of climate policy in Switzerland

Swiss targets for climate policy require significant reductions of emissions by 2050. While such reductions can be achieved in a cost-efficient manner by employing taxes on greenhouse gas emissions, such taxes...

Authors: Florian Landis

Lowering CO₂ emissions in the Swiss transport sector

In Switzerland, transportation represents 41% of CO₂ emissions from energy combustion (2016), a much higher share than in the European Union (EU) (28%) or even the USA (34%). While total Swiss CO₂ emissions decre...

Authors: Philippe Thalmann and Marc Vielle

Growth impacts of Swiss steering-based climate policies

This paper studies the growth impacts of realizing two long-term carbon targets in Switzerland (reducing CO₂ emissions in 2050 by 72% and 80% relative to 1990 levels) with alternative steering-based climate polic...

Authors: Adriana Marcucci and Lin Zhang

Confederation debt management since 1970

This paper analyzes the Confederation’s debt management. The Confederation actively manages roll over and interest rate risk by increasing bond maturity with increasing marketable debt-to-GDP levels. It furthe...

Authors: Basil Guggenheim, Mario Meichle and Thomas Nellen

The demand for Swiss banknotes: some new evidence

Knowing the part of currency in circulation that is used for transactions is important information for a central bank. For several countries, the share of banknotes that is hoarded or circulates abroad is size...

Authors: Katrin Assenmacher, Franz Seitz and Jörn Tenhofen

A survey-based estimation of the Swiss franc forward term premium

This paper sheds light on Swiss franc LIBOR futures, which are often used to derive interest rate expectations. We show that the differences between LIBOR futures and realized rates (excess returns) are, on av...

Authors: Lucas Marc Fuhrer, Basil Guggenheim and Matthias Jüttner

Nominal stability over two centuries

I assess the stability of the monetary environment in Switzerland over the past two centuries. In order to control for transitory measurement errors, in particular in nineteenth century data, I use an unobserv...

Authors: Daniel Kaufmann

Preaching water but drinking wine? Relative performance evaluation in international banking

The rise in the level of executive compensation in international banking in the last two decades has been striking. At the same time, corporate declarations of relative performance evaluation (RPE) have enjoye...

Authors: Dragan Ilić, Sonja Pisarov and Peter S. Schmidt

Macroeconomic surprises, market environment, and safe-haven currencies

We study the reaction of the CHF and JPY to macroeconomic surprises and changes in the broader market environment before and during the crisis using high-frequency data. Results show that the CHF and JPY are t...

Authors: Adrian Jäggi, Martin Schlegel and Attilio Zanetti

How can states benefit from the equity premium puzzle? Debt as revenue source for Swiss cantons

This paper addresses the question of the optimal debt level of a state (canton) that issues new bonds and subsequently invests the borrowed capital. For that purpose, we first estimate the effect of the debt l...

Authors: Ramon Christen and Nils C. Soguel

The Balassa-Samuelson effect reversed: new evidence from OECD countries

This paper reconsiders the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) hypothesis. We analyze an OECD country panel from 1970 to 2008 and compare three data sets on sectoral productivity, including newly constructed data on total ...

Authors: Matthias Gubler and Christoph Sax

Culture, money attitudes and economic outcomes

Using novel survey data, we examine attitudes towards money and to what extent they affect economic outcomes in Switzerland. We find that three main types of attitudes towards money co-exist: the prestige and ...

Authors: Caroline Henchoz, Tristan Coste and Boris Wernli

Financial literacy and the need for financial education: evidence and implications

Authors: Annamaria Lusardi

The U.S. Tax Program for Swiss banks: what determined the penalties?

The U.S. Tax Program for Swiss banks is a very significant part of the recent history of the Swiss financial industry. It has accelerated the transformation of the Swiss banking industry from a system that rel...

Authors: Yvan Lengwiler and Albana Saljihaj

Unbiased weighted variance and skewness estimators for overlapping returns

This article develops unbiased weighted variance and skewness estimators for overlapping return distributions. These estimators extend the variance estimation methods constructed in Bod et. al. (Applied Financ...

Authors: Stephen Taylor and Ming Fang

Term structure dynamics at low and negative interest rates—evidence from Switzerland

This paper studies the transmission of changes in short-term interest rates to longer-term government bond yields when interest rates are at very low levels or negative. We focus on Switzerland, where short-te...

Authors: Christian Grisse and Silvio Schumacher

Openness and productivity of the Swiss economy

This paper analyzes the connection between openness and economic performance in Switzerland. Considering different dimensions of openness, we show that the Swiss economy is classified as relatively open. Never...

Authors: Reto Föllmi, Angela Fuest, Philipp an de Meulen, Martin Micheli, Torsten Schmidt and Lina Zwick

Optimal equity capital requirements for large Swiss banks

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 cap...

Authors: Georg Junge and Peter Kugler

Debt, economic growth, and interest rates: an empirical study of the Swiss case, presenting a new long-term dataset: 1894–2014

In this paper, relations between public debt, economic growth, and long-term interest rates in Switzerland from 1894 to 2014 are examined. For this purpose, an original long-term dataset on the general gross p...

Authors: Guillaume Guex and Sébastien Guex

Childcare and maternal part-time employment: a natural experiment using Swiss cantons

Fuelled by federal stimuli of 440 million Swiss francs, the staggered expansion of childcare in many cantons allows the evaluation of this family policy on female labour supply. With new cantonal data, this st...

Authors: Laura Ravazzini