This paper develops an empirical framework giving rise to a nonlinear behaviour of the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT). Rather than shifts between low and high infl ation, the nonlinearity arises when large swings in the exchange rate trigger market entries and exits of importing firms....

We shed light on the function, properties and optimal size of austerity using the standard sovereign debt model augmented to include incomplete information about credit risk. Austerity is defined as the shortfall of consumption from the level desired by a country and supported by its repayment...

Import competition from China is pervasive in the sense that for many good categories, the competitive environment that US fi?rms face in these markets is strongly driven by the prices of Chinese imports, and so is their pricing decision. This paper quanti?fies the effect of the...

This paper first shows that capital inflows to and outflows from financial centres were disproportionately affected by the global financial crisis. Switzerland was no exception. The paper then identifies waves of capital flows to and from Switzerland from 2000:Q1 to 2014:Q2 by using a simple...

Empirical evidence shows that macroeconomic fundamentals have little explanatory power for nominal exchange rates. On the other hand, the recent "microstructure approach to exchange rates" has shown that most exchange rate volatility at short to medium horizons is related to order flows. This...

Stylized facts on output and interest rates in the U.S. have so far proved hard to match with business cycle models. But these ¯ndings do not acknowledge that the economy might well be driven by di®erent shocks, and by each in di®erent ways. I estimate covariances of output, nominal and real...

We analyze the effect of the projected demographic transition on the political support for social security, and equilibrium outcomes. Embedding a probabilistic-voting setup of electoral competition in the Diamond (1965) OLG model, we find that intergenerational transfers arise in the absence of...

The paper analyzes the impact of financial liberalizations and reforms in emerging markets on the dynamics of capital flows to these markets, using a simple model of international investors' behavior. We first show that the gradual nature of liberalizations, combined with the cost of absorbing...

In this paper, we test for the presence of market discipline in the Swiss deposit market. In particular, we examine whether depositors monitor their banks by withdrawing their saving deposits whenever the fundamentals of their bank is no longer satisfactory. We use a panel of bank-specific data...

There is widespread evidence of excess return predictability in financial markets. In this paper we examine whether this predictability is related to expectational errors. To consider this issue, we use data on survey expectations of market participants in the stock market, the foreign exchange...