The paper studies the profit distribution and portfolio management of the Swiss National Bank in comparison with the behavior of other European central banks.It is shown that the SNB's behavior is unique in a number of respects : Relatively to the countries size, it holds the largest gold...

The paper studies the profit distribution and portfolio management of the Swiss National Bank in comparison with the behavior of other European central banks. It is shown that the SNB's behavior is unique in a number of respects : Relatively to the countries size, it holds the largest gold...

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) currently holds reserves of more than 40 billion CHF. In the future she wishes to increase her reserves by about 1 billion CHF per year. The new law on the SNB must be used to make the SNB behave according to the same standards as other national banks. Her reserves...

This paper discusses the potential for lenders’ capital requirements to be used as ‘automatic stabilisers’ of the business cycle in New Zealand. The procyclicality of lending, and its importance for cyclical developments, motivates the consideration of regulation of lending for...

In 1873, Denmark, Norway and Sweden formed the Scandinavian Currency Union (SCU) and adopted the gold standard. The Union worked fairly smoothly during the next thirty years and was partly extended until 1914. The outbreak of World War I triggered a series of events that eventually would lead to...

Economic theory traditionally suggests that monetary policy can influence the business cycle, but not the long-run potential output. Despite well documented theoretical and empirical consensus on money neutrality in the literature, the role of money as an informational variable for monetary...

This main sections of this annotated bibliography were prepared by the author between 1998 and 2002. The revisions undertaken until January 2006 are selective and do not claim to be complete. The paper has no official character and merely reflects the views of the author. Its purpose is to...

Purpose – While in developed economies, changes in monetary policy affect real economic activity in the short-run but only prices in the long-run, the question of whether these tendencies apply to developing countries remains open to debate. In this paper, we examine the effects of monetary...