Currencies of countries with persistent current account surpluses and high foreign currency denominated assets such as the Swiss franc and Japanese yen are under a persistent appreciation pressure, what restricts the degree of freedom in the choice of exchange rate regime. Official announcements...

Lukas Heim evaluates the performance of a price-level targeting rule compared to that of a standard inflation targeting rule. The comparison is based on a medium-scale DSGE model which has been estimated based on state-of-the-art Bayesian methods. The model for the Swiss economy is an expanded...

We analyze the effect of negative monetary policy rates on banks, using detailed supervisory information from Switzerland. For identification, we compare changes in the behavior of banks that had different fractions of their central bank reserves exempt from negative rates. More affected banks...

Fabian Schnell develops a model indicating that by keeping real interest rates too low, monetary policy can distort the allocation of resources across firms and potentially delay economic recovery after a recession. This is a new channel of monetary policy that is especially relevant in view of...