While Switzerland's recent growth of employment was high in historical and international perspective, the reasons for this "job miracle" were not well understood. As the "miracle" was not anticipated by economic forecasters, it consequently resulted in systematic and persistent forecast errors....

In their introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on "Great Depressions of the 20th Century" (Vol. 5, 2002), Timothy J. Kehoe and Edward C. Prescott argue that in the last few years "great depressions" have hit two rich countries: New Zealand and Switzerland. We...

This paper documents a comparative application of algorithms to deal with the problem of missing values in higher frequency data sets. We refer to Swiss business tendency survey (BTS) data, in particular the KOF manufacturing surveys, which are conducted in both monthly and quarterly frequency,...