The study of transparency is increasingly a more topical, broadly relevant, but also more under-researched enterprise. The Asian financial crisis has highlighted not only the welfare consequences of financial sector transparency, sparking a series of yet unresolved debates, but has also linked...

The Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s not only highlighted the welfare consequences of transparency in the financial sector but also linked this relatively narrow problem to the broader context of transparency in governance. It has been observed that objections to transparency, often on...

In a general equilibrium in which bribe-extracting bureaucrats can endogenously choose regulatory burden and delay, the effective (not just nominal) red tape and bribery can be positively correlated across firms. Using data from three worldwide firm surveys, this paper finds evidence consistent...

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 unobserved-components stochastic-volatility model to extract the permanent trends from several...

Measurement error in historical data distorts descriptive analyses based on binary classifications. Modern replications of deficiencies in retrospective CPI estimates for the 19th century show that measurement issues cause misclassification of inflationary and deflationary episodes. We therefore...

This paper identifies the effect of variation in government-backed loan supply on unemployment exploiting regional variation in the Swiss COVID-19 lending program. The rules of the program introduce variation in loan supply across Cantons. This variation helps disentangling supply from demand...

I study the link between real activity and deflation, taking into account measurement problems in 19th century CPI data. Replications based on modern data show that measurement problems spuriously increase the volatility of inflation as well as the number of deflationary episodes, and they lower...