This paper starts by documenting that during the last decades, the human capital embodied in imports from skill abundant nations has noticeably reduced skill accumulation in the less developed world. To identify the causal relation between these variables, the analysis utilizes over-time...

This paper estimates Taylor rules using real-time inflation forecasts of the Swiss National Bank's (SNB) ARIMA model and real-time model-based internal estimates of the output gap since the onset of the monetary policy concept adopted in 2000. To study how market participants understand the...

Merchanting is goods trade that does not cross the border of the firm's country of residence. Merchanting grew strongly in the last decade in several small open economies, particularly in Finland, Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland, and has become an important driver of these countries' current...

This paper assesses the transmission of monetary policy in a large Bayesian vector autoregression based on the approach proposed by Banbura, Giannone and Reichlin (2010). The paper analyzes the impact of monetary policy shocks in the United States and Canada not only on a range of domestic...

This paper analyzes the way in which international financial integration affects the transmission of monetary policy in a New Keynesian open economy framework. It extends Woodford's (2010) analysis to a model with a richer financial markets structure, allowing for international trading in...

Deviations of national industrial production indexes from trend explain time variation in excess returns on the G7 countries' stock markets. This paper highlights that this finding is driven by a global, common component in the national production gaps. The global component is not a mirror image...

This study documents the SNB's ARIMA model based on disaggregated CPI data used to produce inflation forecasts over the short-term horizon, and evaluates its forecasting performance. Our findings suggest that the disaggregate ARIMA model for the Swiss CPI performed better than relevant...

This paper evaluates the relative importance of commodity price shocks in the U.S. business cycle. Therefore, we extend the standard set of business cycle shocks to include unexpected changes in commodity prices. The resulting SVAR shows that commodity price shocks are a very important driving...

The Swiss National Bank (SNB) provides reserves to market participants via fixed rate tender auctions. We analyze the banks’ bidding behavior and identify the determinants for the decision to participate as well as on the amount to tender. Therefore, we estimate bidding functions for banks...

This paper looks into the determinants of the Swiss franc exchange rate against the euro. Based on the monetary approach to exchange rates, we start from the premise that monetary policy has an influence on the exchange rate. To measure this effect, we apply the structural vector-autoregression...