We examine the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical government interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19. In particular, we focus on the impact of strictness and variability in government interventions on the reproduction rate (Rt) and the number of new deaths (per million of inhabitants) in five...

Government interventions to limit the spread of the COVID-19 disease have decreased mobility, which, in turn, impacts aggregate economic activity. Understanding mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic may serve as a proxy for understanding its economic impact. This study aims to examine the...

This study uses trade data from Switzerland's Federal Customs Administration to examine the impact of Covid-19 on international goods trade between January and July 2020. We show that Swiss trade during that period fell by 11% compared to 2019 and that the contraction following the "Federal...

We develop a structural vector autoregressive framework that combines external instruments and heteroskedasticity for identification of monetary policy shocks. We show that exploiting both types of information sharpens structural inference, allows testing the relevance and exogeneity condition...

Weltweit haben sich 91 Länder Fiskalregeln auferlegt, um die Staatsverschuldung und/oder das Haushaltsdefizit zu begrenzen. Wie sich diese Fiskalregeln auf die gesamtwirtschaftliche Entwicklung nach Krisen auswirken, untersucht dieser Bericht anhand von vergangenen Naturkatastrophen. Demnach...

This study investigates the stock price-economic activity nexus in 12 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) by employing monthly data over the period 1981:1-2018:3. For this purpose, the study uses Granger causality in the frequency domain in the...

The number of short-time workers from January to April 2020 is used to now- and forecast quarterly GDP growth. We purge the monthly log level series from the systematic component to extract unexpected changes or shocks to log short-time workers. These monthly shocks are included in a univariate...

We document whether a simple, univariate model for quarterly GDP growth is able to deliver forecasts of yearly GDP growth in a crisis period like the Covid-19 pandemic, which may serve cross-checking forecasts obtained from elaborate and expert models used by forecasting institutions. We include...