Search
Results
-
The Role of ECB Communication in Guiding Markets
(2019)KOF Working PapersEconomists and central bankers nowadays believe that forward guidance has become more important in a world in which key interest rates have hit their effective lower bounds (ELB). In case of the European Central Bank (ECB), this should have increased the informational content of the introductory statements at the press conference following ECB policy meetings. We examine whether this form of ECB communication adds information to a shadow ...Working Paper -
Interest Rate Expectations in the Media and Central Bank Communication
(2013)KOF Working PapersWhile there is ample evidence how central bank communication and interest rate decisions are perceived by financial markets, insights regarding the response of the public is lacking. Media is known to be an important transmitter of news to the public. Based on articles in the Financial Times Europe, we test how expectations on the future course of monetary policy presented in the media are affected by central bank communication and interest ...Working Paper -
Do IMF and World Bank influence voting in the UN general assembly?
(2006)KOF Working PapersUsing panel data for 188 countries over the period 1970-2002 this paper empirically analyzes the influence of the IMF and the World Bank on voting patterns in the UN General Assembly. Countries receiving adjustment programs and larger non-concessional loans from the World Bank vote more frequently in line with the average G7 country. The same is true for countries obtaining non-concessional IMF programs. Regarding voting coincidence with ...Working Paper -
Politics and IMF Conditionality
(2013)KOF Working PapersBailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather weak stringency. Obstacles to testing this hypothesis include finding a measure of political importance that is not plagued by endogeneity and ...Working Paper -
Tax competition and income sorting
(2009)KOF Working PapersIn this paper, we provide empirical evidence for the influence of income taxes on the choice of residence of taxpayers at the local level. The fact that Swiss communities can individually set tax multipliers thereby shifting the progressive tax scheme which is fixed at the cantonal (state) level enables us to study the effect of differences in income taxation on individuals’ choice of location within an economically and culturally homogeneous ...Working Paper -
Economic, demographic and political determinants of pollution reassessed
(2006)KOF Working PapersRecent literature proposes many variables as significant determinants of pollution. This paper gives an overview of this literature and asks which of these factors have an empirically robust impact on water and air pollution, i.e. do not depend upon the conditioning information set. For this, we apply Extreme Bound Analysis (EBA) on a panel of 208 countries covering the period 1960–2001. We find supportive evidence on the existence of the ...Working Paper -
The information content of KOF indicators on Swiss current account data revisions
(2008)KOF Working PapersThis paper analyses revisions of Swiss current account data, taking into account the actual data revision process and the implied types of revisions. In addition we investigate whether the first release of current account data can be improved upon by the use of survey results as gathered by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich. An answer in the affirmative indicates that it is possible to improve first releases and thereby enhance ...Working Paper -
It's politics, stupid!
(2014)KOF Working PapersRelying on a large sample of countries, this paper quantifies the effect of political constraints, as measured by legislative control by the incumbent government, on the size of fiscal stimulus packages that have been put in place as reaction to the Great Recession. The results suggest that on average, political constraints reduced the size of a country's fiscal stimulus packages by between 1.2 and 2.8 percentage points of GDP (depending ...Working Paper -
An outlier-robust extreme bounds analysis of the determinants of health-care expenditure growth
(2012)KOF Working PapersHartwig (2008) has presented empirical evidence that the difference between real wage growth and productivity growth at the macroeconomic level is a robust explanatory variable for deflated health-care expenditure growth in OECD countries. In this paper, we test whether this finding is robust to the inclusion of additional covariates, applying different versions of Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA) to data for 33 OECD countries over the period ...Working Paper -
The Global Economic Barometers: Composite indicators for the world economy
(2020)KOF Working PapersThis paper presents a coincident and a leading composite monthly indicator for the world business cycle − the Global Economic Barometers. Both target the world’s output growth rate cycle. The calculation of these indicators comprises two main stages. The first consists of a variable selection procedure, in which a pre-set correlation threshold and the targeted leads to a reference series are used as selection criteria. In the second stage, ...Working Paper