This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of an oil price shock in a small open industrial economy without oil resources, namely, Switzerland. First, we test whether oil price shocks Granger-cause Swiss macroeconomic variables, and use a medium-scale macroeconometric model to track the...

We investigate how firms' market power affects the price level. In our small macro-model we show, that firms - in addition to hypothesised structural mark-up pricing power - may take advantage of favourable business cycle fluctuations. The paper provides empirical evidence for both these...

For many years, Business Tendency Surveys on the basis of mailing suffer from an erosion of the response rate. To counter this problem, there are traditional methods as limitation of the number of questions, improvement of the design of the questionnaire, intensified recalls by mail or...