This paper proposes a new procedure for shock identification of macroeconomic forecasts based on factor analysis. Our identification scheme for information shocks relies on data reduction techniques for daily panels and the recognition that macroeconomic releases exhibit a high level of...

The timely release of macroeconomic data imposes a distinct structure on the panel: the clustering and sequential ordering of real and nominal variables. We call this orderly release of economic data sequential information flow. The ordered panel generates a new class of restrictions that are...

Recent time-series evidence has re-confirmed the forecasting ability of Swiss broad money. The same money demand studies and others, however, find that the income elasticity is greater than one. Such parameter estimates are difficult to reconcile with transactions demand theory. This study...

Reuters news reports have become an accepted tool for empirical studies analyzing informational asymmetries in FX markets. This paper tests the accuracy of the Reuters reports for Swiss interventions in the foreign exchange market. The evidence finds that the time stamp of the Reuters reports...

The monetary implications arising from EMU for Swiss monetary policy show up primarily in the exchange rate. Until now, fluctuations in the Swiss franc against the euro have been surprisingly moderate. The Swiss franc has thus tracked the euro's decline against the US dollar without experiencing...

Price clustering is a well-documented regularity of foreign exchange transactions. In this paper, I present new empirical evidence of price clustering for central bank interventions. A feature of the price clustering in Swiss National Bank (SNB) transactions is market dependency. Evidence of...

This note sheds new light on the dynamic properties of maintenance and repair and examines the behavior of an additional form of capital spending - that of improvements. The analysis examines a unique long-run data set on Swiss road spending.

In this paper, we examine external, monetary, and structural determinants of crosscountry variation in reserve volatility for 30 emerging market economies from 1973 to 2000. We find that reserve holdings and openness to be the most important determinants of reserve volatility. These results are...

In this article, we demonstrate that a small degree of stochastic variation in the depreciation rate of capital can greatly reduce the comovement between hours worked and labor productivity in a neoclassical growth model. The depreciation rate is modeled as a Markov process to place a strict...