This paper estimates the pass-through and speed of adjustment of Italian regional interest rates to changes in the money market rate for the period 1998Q1-2009Q4. Our main findings suggest that the markup for the lending rates that banks charge are generally higher in the South than in the...

This paper studies the effect of sharing a common native language on international trade. Switzerland hosts three major native language groups which adjoin countries sharing the same native majority languages. In regions close to the internal language border the alternate major language is...

In light of the strong increase of house prices in Switzerland, we analyze the effects of mortgage rate shocks, changes in the interplay between housing demand and supply and GDP growth on house prices for the time period 1981- 2014. We employ Bayesian time-varying coefficients vector...

The paper addresses the question on what is the typical time horizon over which a full transmission of movements in the real exchange rate into real economy takes place. To this end, we base our analysis on the mixed-frequency small-scale dynamic factor model of Siliverstovs (2012) fitted to the...

It is generally accepted that regional labor markets are characterized by strong interdependencies. However, only few studies include spatial elements to their estimations. Using the model framework proposed by Cliff and Ord (1973, 1981) and the estimation technique proposed by Kelejian and...

Okun's Law postulates a stable relationship between quarterly output growth and changes in (un)employment. This proposition has so far been tested with macroeconomic data at the highest level of aggregation. The paper goes beyond that in extending the analysis to industry data from Switzerland,...

In this paper we propose a straightforward method to derive a non-accelerating inflation capacity utilisation rate (NAICU) based on micro data. We condition the current capacity utilisation of firms on their current and planned price adjustments. The non-accelerating inflation capacity...

In this paper we develop a business cycle measure that can be shown to have excellent ex-ante forecasting properties for GDP growth. For identifying business cycle movements, we use a semantic approach. We infer nine different states of the economy directly from firms' responses in business...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...

We investigate whether the KOF Barometer - a leading indicator regularly released by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute - can be useful for short-term out-of-sample prediction of year-on-year quarterly real GDP growth rates in Switzerland. We find that the KOF Barometer appears to be useful for...