This paper presents a composite leading indicator for the Swiss business cycle corresponding to the growth rate cycle concept. It is the result of a complete overhaul of the KOF Economic Barometer that has been published by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute on a monthly basis since 1976. In line...

In historical accounts of the world economic crisis of the 1930s, Switzerland is known for its staunch defense of the gold standard and the rise of corporatist policies. Yet, so far, the literature has not discussed the implications of these two features. This paper tries to show how the...

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...

In a pioneering attempt we present the R(ecession)-word index for Switzerland. We evaluate its predictive ability of GDP growth using real-time vintages of GDP data, closely simulating flow of information in the past. We find that inclusion of the R-word index led to statistically significant...