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...

The monetary debate in Switzerland about joining the European Monetary Union (EMU) has primarily focused on the gains in terms of transaction costs and lower uncertainty from using a common currency versus the sacrifice of giving up an independent monetary policy. This Paper considers an...

It is well known that the uncovered interest rate parity fails in the short run but usually holds in the long run. This paper analyses the long and short run interest rate parity of 10 major OECD currencies and finds that there is a long run failure of the uncovered interest rate parity...

This Paper revisits the puzzle of low returns on Swiss franc assets using a new dataset of international portfolio holdings at Swiss banks. The main findings are as follows. First, we find that the return anomaly is present only for fixed income assets and not for equity. Second, it is mostly...