Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics最新文献

Even though the recession in Switzerland triggered by COVID-19 ultimately remained without consequences for the apprenticeship market, significantly fewer apprenticeship contracts had been signed in the months of the first shutdown in 2020 than in the same months of the previous year. Using daily search queries on the national administrative platform for apprenticeship vacancies from February 2020 until April 2021 as a proxy for the supply of potential apprentices, we find a temporal pattern that coincides perfectly with the development of signed apprenticeship contracts. Furthermore, the analyses show that the initially very strong relationship between the intensity of the politically imposed restrictions to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and the daily search queries diminished over time, leading to a search intensity in March 2021 that was back at pre-pandemic level.

The partial shutdown of the economy following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the lack of measurements of economic activity that are available with a short lag and at high frequency. The consumption of electricity turns out to be a valuable proxy, if it is corrected for influences from calendar and weather. Indeed, this proxy suggests that we are currently facing one of the deepest recessions ever.

This paper documents daily compound indicators on physical mobility and sales activity in Switzerland during the Corona crisis. We report several insights from these indicators: The Swiss population substantially reduced its activities already before the shops closed and before the authorities introduced containment policies in mid-March 2020. Activity started to gradually recover from the beginning of April onwards, again substantially before the first phase of the shutdown easing started at the end of April. Low physical mobility during the second half of March and during April likely contributed to the quick fall in new COVID-19 infections since mid-March. The sharp drop in economic activity in consumer-related services during March and April and the gradual recovery in these sectors since May correlate strongly with the reduction and subsequent gradual resurgence of mobility. In addition, while activity within Switzerland was back to normal levels by late June, activity of Swiss residents outside of Switzerland was still below normal.

The number of short-time workers from January to April 2020 is used to now- and forecast quarterly GDP growth. We purge the monthly log level series from the systematic component to extract unexpected changes or shocks to log short-time workers. These monthly shocks are included in a univariate model for quarterly GDP growth to capture timely, current-quarter unexpected changes in growth dynamics. Included shocks additionally explain 24% in GDP growth variation. The model is able to forecast quite precisely the decrease in GDP during the financial crisis. It predicts a mean decline in GDP of 5.7% over the next two quarters. Without additional growth stimulus, the GDP level forecast remains persistently 4% lower in the long run. The uncertainty is large, as the 95% highest forecast density interval includes a decrease in GDP as large as 9%. A recovery to pre-crisis GDP level in 2021 lies only in the upper tail of the 95% highest forecast density interval.

The following contribution compares the unemployment situation arising from the lockdown induced by the Covid-19 pandemic with previous employment crises in Switzerland. In addition, it forecasts the future trajectory of unemployment based on ongoing changes in hazard rates. From a historical perspective, current unemployment as well as that expected by the federal authorities in the medium term do not seem that dramatic. Current hazard rates present a different picture, however, predicting increases in both the unemployment rate and long-term unemployment to record levels.

The mutual funds' returns, inter alia, are dependent on fund managers' performance. This makes human capital efficiency very central for consistent risk-adjusted performance. The persistence in performance becomes more critical during periods of high turbulence, like the one we are experiencing amidst the outbreak of Covid-19. In this research, we attempt to evaluate the performance of equity funds in massively impacted Latin American countries. These equity funds, with 95% of their investment in the infected region, are ranked as per their human capital efficiency using 2019 as the base year. Our findings demonstrate that funds with higher human capital efficiency significantly outperform their counterparts that rank lower on human capital efficiency. These findings remained consistent for the sub-periods that we specify to map the evolution of Covid-19. We conclude that equity funds should enhance their human capital efficiency to endure resilience amid macroeconomic shocks.

Because macroeconomic data is published with a substantial delay, assessing the health of the economy during the rapidly evolving COVID-19 crisis is challenging. We develop a fever curve for the Swiss economy using publicly available daily financial market and news data. The indicator can be computed with a delay of 1 day. Moreover, it is highly correlated with macroeconomic data and survey indicators of Swiss economic activity. Therefore, it provides timely and reliable warning signals if the health of the economy takes a turn for the worse.

We assess the impact of the timing of lockdown measures implemented in Germany and Switzerland on cumulative COVID-19-related hospitalization and death rates. Our analysis exploits the fact that the epidemic was more advanced in some regions than in others when certain lockdown measures came into force, based on measuring health outcomes relative to the region-specific start of the epidemic and comparing outcomes across regions with earlier and later start dates. When estimating the effect of the relative timing of measures, we control for regional characteristics and initial epidemic trends by linear regression (Germany and Switzerland), doubly robust estimation (Germany), or synthetic controls (Switzerland). We find for both countries that a relatively later exposure to the measures entails higher cumulative hospitalization and death rates on region-specific days after the outbreak of the epidemic, suggesting that an earlier imposition of measures is more effective than a later one. For Germany, we further evaluate curfews (as introduced in a subset of states) based on cross-regional variation. We do not find any effects of curfews on top of the federally imposed contact restriction that banned groups of more than 2 individuals.

This paper analyzes card payments to the retail sector in Switzerland during the COVID-19 crisis. We provide evidence on aggregate effects and regional shifts. Pronounced shifts-which persisted post-lockdown-can be observed from urban to suburban and rural areas and among cantons. Data allow us to identify directly two sources of shifts: "tourists and business travelers" and "e-commerce." We indirectly identify additional sources: infection risk, lockdown measures, working from home, shopping tourism, and cash substitution. The COVID-19 crisis seems to have reinforced pre-existing trends that may have faster than anticipated effects on the economy. Our analysis underscores the usefulness of real-time card payment data to inform policymakers.

Sharp changes in consumer expenditure may bias inflation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using public data from debit card transactions, I quantify these changes in consumer spending, update CPI basket weights and construct an alternative price index to measure the effect of the COVID-induced weighting bias on the Swiss consumer price index. I find that inflation was higher during the lock-down than suggested by CPI inflation. The annual inflation rate of the COVID price index was -0.4% by April 2020, compared to -1.1% of the equivalent CPI. Persistent "low-touch" consumer behavior can further lead to inflation being underestimated by more than a quarter of a percentage point until the end of 2020.