Numerous studies provided evidence for the potentially positive effect of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) on employee attitudes, yet little is known about how they might affect work outcomes for employees with disabilities, a marginalized and understudied group. The present study builds on conservation of resources theory to explain how i-deals negotiation might influence perceived work ability among employees with disabilities, and in turn, their turnover intention. Further, this study is among the first to compare the experiences of employees with physical, psychological and no disabilities. We then test our hypotheses using field data from 19,770 employees working for a large German service organization. We find the negative direct effect of i-deals on turnover intention to be stronger for employees with physical disabilities than for those without disabilities. Further, the results indicate a significant mediation effect of i-deals on turnover intention through perceived work ability for all employee groups. As expected, we find a tendency for this mediation effect to increase in magnitude when going from the conditions “having a physical” or “having no disability” to the condition “having a psychological disability”. Implications for research, theory and practice are discussed.
We analyze how the transmission of international inflation spillovers depends on the nature of the underlying shocks that drive inflation abroad. We find evidence for substantial heterogeneity in the magnitude of spillovers to domestic inflation related to the fundamental source of international price fluctuations and the corresponding monetary policy reactions. Indeed, it turns out that the relative conduct of monetary policy varies depending on the source of these price fluctuations, and so does the role of the exchange rate as a shock absorber. We show this by looking at international inflation spillovers to Switzerland through the lenses of a Bayesian structural dynamic factor model relating a large set of disaggregated prices to key macroeconomic factors. Being a small open economy with an independent monetary policy, Switzerland is a particularly suitable subject for studying the role of monetary policy in the transmission of foreign shocks. However, our results more broadly indicate that inflation spillovers need to be analyzed in a framework allowing for different transmission channels.
For policy institutions such as central banks, it is important to have a timely and ac-curate measure of past and current economic activity and the business cycle situation. The most prominent example for such a measure is gross domestic product (GDP). However, GDP is only released at a quarterly frequency and with a substantial delay. Furthermore, it captures elements that are not directly linked to the business cycle and the underlying momentum of the economy. In this paper, I construct a new business cycle index for the Swiss economy, which uses state-of-the-art methods, is available at a monthly frequency and can be calculated in real-time, even when some indicators are not yet available for the most recent periods. The index is based on a large and broad set of monthly and quarterly indicators. As I show, for the case of Switzerland, it is important to base a business-cycle index on a broad set of indicators instead of only a small subset. This result contrasts with the results for other countries.
