Qualitative surveys enjoy huge popularity among business cycle analysts and research institutes since they provide fast information on the stance of the economy. However, in order to derive quantitative statements researchers have to rely on assumptions about the relation between quantitative...

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...

Economists and econometricians very often work with data which has been temporally disaggregated prior to use. Hence, the quality of the disaggregation clearly aspects the qual- ity of the analyses. Building on Chow and Lin's (1971) disaggregation model this paper proposes a new estimation...

The paper reconstructs the origins of the quantity theory of money and its applications. Referring to the history of money, it is shown that the theory was flexible enough to adapt to institutional change and could thus maintain its actuality. To this day, it is useful as an analytical...

In 2001 more than 80 percent of the Swiss electorate voted in favour of a constitutional amendment which aims at stopping the expansion of the public debt. A convincingly simple and seemingly intuitive formula provides an easy-to-implement expenditure rule for the budgetary process. This...

Efficient price setting implies that news create volatility since traders flock to the market in order to re-optimise their portfolios. In due course of the price finding process volatility should decline once the asset price approaches its new, efficient level. In this note I present evidence...

Growth regression economics are haunted by the fact that results are easily overthrown by regressing alternative model specifications. Recent research therefore aims at obtaining robust regression results by systematically running multiple models and picking surviving variables. This note shows...