infonet-economy

BACKGROUND: Negative symptoms of schizophrenia can be grouped in 2 dimensions: apathy and diminished expression. Increasing evidence suggests that negative symptoms are associated with altered neural activity of subcortical and cortical regions in the brain reward system. However, the neurobiological basis of the distinct symptom dimensions within negative symptoms is still poorly...

Does information processing affect individual risk-taking behaviour? This article provides evidence that professional athletes suffer from a left-digit bias when dealing with signals about differences in performance. Using data from the highly competitive field of World Cup alpine skiing for the period of 1992–2014, we show that athletes misinterpret actual differences in race times...

Structural models for forward electricity prices are of great relevance nowadays, given the major structural changes in the market due to the increase of renewable energy in the production mix. In this study, we aim at understanding the dynamics of the risk premium (the drift in the dynamics) and the noise (non-Gaussian, stochastic volatility) in futures prices for electricity. We...

The US financial crisis and the later eurozone crisis have substantially impacted capital flows into and out of financial centers like Switzerland. We focus on the pattern of capital flows involving the Swiss banking industry. We first rely on balance-of-payment statistics and show that net banking inflows rose during the acute phases of the crises, albeit with a contrasting pattern...

According to economic theory, the intertemporal budget constraint of households implies that a permanent increase in wealth should have a positive effect on consumer spending. Given the comparatively strong increase in Swiss household wealth over the past few years, the question of the extent to which changes in wealth influence expenditures of households has become of special...

Foreign economic activity is a major determinant of export development. This paper presents an indicator for now- and forecasting exports, which is based on survey data that captures foreign economic perspectives. We construct an indicator by weighting foreign PMIs of main trading partners with their respective export shares. For two very trade exposed countries (Germany and...

This economic study presents and analyses newly collected real-time data for Swiss GDP. It extends existing data sets by covering annual and quarterly aggregate GDP values for a longer sample, with vintages starting in 1971 (annual) and 1983 (quarterly). The analysis comprises a graphical and statistical description of quarterly GDP releases and tests for unbiasedness and efficiency...

We demonstrate empirically that not all international capital flows influence exchange rates equally. Capital flows induced by foreign investors' transactions in local stock markets have an impact on exchange rates that is both economically significant and permanent, whereas capital flows induced by foreign investors' transactions in the local government bond market do not. We relate...

We conducted a simple, anonymous survey at the beginning of 2014, asking around 200 economists worldwide to reveal their inflation expectations, conditional on either Ben Bernanke or Janet Yellen being the chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. We use the change in the Fed's leadership to focus attention on the difference in conditional expectations, while we are...