infonet-economy

This paper summarises the principal findings of the data collection efforts by the independent Global Trade Alert team on public procurement policy changes undertaken since November 2008. A particular focus is on policy changes that alter the relative treatment of domestic firms vis-à-vis foreign rivals. The ultimate goal of this paper is to inform other, ongoing data collection…

Die Steuerung, Führung und Kontrolle von öffentlichen Unternehmen - auch bekannt unter dem Begriff «Public Corporate Governance» - ist ein aktuelles und wichtiges Thema. Dies zeigt schon die Tatsache,
dass die Kantone der Schweiz rund 1000 Beteiligungen an 600 Unternehmen halten. Wie sollen diese Beteiligungen beaufsichtigt und kontrolliert werden, ohne ihre unternehmerische…

The recent crisis has revealed that bank and sovereign risks are inherently intertwined. This paper develops a model of the bank-sovereign nexus to identify the main spillovers and to study the implications of guarantees and capital regulation. We show how banks’ asset risk may trigger a sovereign default through taxation and deposit insurance. The latter can be contagious because of…

We provide the first joint analysis of the secured and unsecured money markets of the euro area using bank-level data. After the Lehman crisis, two important substitution mechanisms emerge: banks with higher credit risk offset reductions of unsecured borrowing with secured funding. Riskier banks replace unsecured lending by granting more secured loans. However, high leverage and…

Property-casualty (P&C) insurers are exposed to rare but severe natural disasters. This paper analyzes the relation between catastrophe risk and the implied volatility smile of insurance stock options. We find that the slope is significantly steeper compared to non-financials and other financial institutions. We show that this effect has increased over time, suggesting a higher…

This research proposes Conditional Currency Hedging based on FX risk factors to reduce total portfolio risk of given stock, bond or commodity portfolios. In our employed sample, a conditional currency hedging framework based on implied FX volatility results in lower variance of a global equity portfolio than achieved by either no, full or unconditional mean-variance hedging, both in…

Unser Land steht heute deshalb so erfolgreich und innovativ da, weil es die Zuwanderung stets zugelassen hat

We ask whether the markets expected the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to discontinue the 1.20 cap on the Swiss franc against the euro in January 2015. In the run-up to the SNB announcement, neither options on the euro/Swiss franc nor FX liquidity indicated a significant shift in market expectations. Furthermore, we find that the SNB's verbal interventions during the period of cap…