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Journal Article
International liquidity provision during the financial crisis: a view from Switzerland
The authors document the provision of liquidity in Swiss francs (CHF) by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to banks located outside Switzerland during the recent financial crisis. What makes the Swiss case special is the size of this liquidity provision?at times, 80 percent of all short-term CHF liquidity provided by the SNB?and the measures adopted to distribute this liquidity. In addition to making CHF available to other central banks via swap facilities, the SNB also allows banks outside Switzerland to directly participate in its repurchase agreement transactions. Although this policy was adopted for reasons predating the 2007-09 financial crisis, it proved tremendously helpful during the crisis by providing the European banking system direct access to the primary funding facility for CHF.
AUTHORS: Auer, Raphael; Kraenzlin, Sebastien
DATE: 2011
Working Paper
International liquidity provision during the financial crisis: a view from Switzerland
We document the provision of CHF liquidity by the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to banks domiciled outside Switzerland during the recent financial crisis. What makes the Swiss case special is the size of this liquidity provision?making up 80 percent of all short term CHF liquidity provided by the SNB?and also the measures that were adopted to distribute this liquidity. In addition to making CHF available to other central banks via SWAP facilities, the SNB also allows banks domiciled outside Switzerland to directly participate in its REPO transactions. Although this policy was adopted for reasons that predate the financial crisis, during the crisis it proved tremendously helpful as it gave the European banking system direct access to the primary funding facility for CHF.
AUTHORS: Auer, Raphael; Kraenzlin, Sebastien
DATE: 2011
Working Paper
Embedded Supervision: How to Build Regulation into Blockchain Finance
The spread of distributed ledger technology (DLT) in finance could help to improve the efficiency and quality of supervision. This paper makes the case for embedded supervision, i.e., a regulatory framework that provides for compliance in tokenized markets to be automatically monitored by reading the market?s ledger, thus reducing the need for firms to actively collect, verify and deliver data. After sketching out a design for such schemes, the paper explores the conditions under which distributed ledger data might be used to monitor compliance. To this end, a decentralized market is modelled that replaces today?s intermediary-based verification of legal data with blockchain-enabled data credibility based on economic consensus. The key results set out the conditions under which the market?s economic consensus would be strong enough to guarantee that transactions are economically final, so that supervisors can trust the distributed ledger?s data. The paper concludes with a discussion of the legislative and operational requirements that would promote low-cost supervision and a level playing field for small and large firms.
AUTHORS: Auer, Raphael
DATE: 2019-10-01
Working Paper
Trade linkages and the globalisation of inflation in Asia and the Pacific
Some observers argue that increased real integration has led to greater co-movement of prices internationally. We examine the evidence for cross-border price spillovers among economies participating in the pan-Asian cross-border production networks. Starting with country-level data, we find that both producer price and consumer price inflation rates move more closely together between those Asian economies that trade more with one another, ie that share a higher degree of trade intensity. Next, using a novel data set based on the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), we examine the importance of the supply chain for cross-border price spillovers at the sectoral level. We document the increasing importance of imported intermediate inputs for economies in the Asia-Pacific region and examine the impact on domestic producer prices of changes in costs of imported intermediate inputs. Our results suggest that real integration through the supply chain matters for domestic price dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region.
AUTHORS: Mehrotra, Aaron; Auer, Raphael
DATE: 2014-04-01
Working Paper
Export basket and the effects of exchange rates on exports–why Switzerland is special
Why has Swiss export performance been so strong during the past quarters despite the strong appreciation of the CHF? In this paper, we use historical data on exchange rates and trade at the sectoral level to document that a contributing factor behind the limited impact of the exchange rate is the unique composition of Swiss exports. In particular, we document that the Swiss export basket is heavily concentrated in price-insensitive goods such as machinery or pharmaceuticals, where prices and thus the exchange rate have relatively little importance for demand. This makes the aggregate volume of Swiss exports less responsive to exchange rate changes than exports of other OECD nations.
AUTHORS: Auer, Raphael; Saure, Philip
DATE: 2011
Working Paper
Globalization and inflation in Europe
What is the impact of import competition from other low-wage countries (LWCs) on inflationary pressure in Western Europe? This paper seeks to understand whether labor-intensive exports from emerging Europe, Asia, and other global regions have a uniform impact on producer prices in Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In a panel covering 110 (4-digit) NACE industries from 1995 to 2008, IV estimates predict that LWC import competition is associated with strong price effects. More specifically, when Chinese exporters capture 1 percent of European market share, producer prices decrease about 2 percent. In contrast, no effect is present for import competition from low-wage countries in Central and Eastern Europe.
AUTHORS: Fischer, Andreas M.; Degen, Kathrin; Auer, Raphael
DATE: 2010
Working Paper
The effect of trade with low-income countries on U.S. industry
When labor-abundant nations grow, their exports increase more in labor-intensive sectors than in capital-intensive sectors. We utilize this sectoral difference in how exports are affected by growth to identify the causal effect of trade with low-income countries (LICs) on U.S. industry. Our framework relates differences in sectoral inflation rates to differences in comparative advantageinduced import growth rates and abstracts from aggregate fluctuations and sector specific trends.> ; In a panel covering 325 manufacturing industries from 1997 to 2006, we find that LIC exports are associated with strong downward pressure on U.S. producer prices and a large effect on productivity. When LIC exporters capture 1% U.S. market share, producer prices decrease by 3.1%, which is nearly fully accounted by a 2.4% increase in productivity and a 0.4% decrease in markups. We also document that while LICs on average find it easier to penetrate sectors with elastic demand, the price and productivity response to import competition is much stronger in industries with inelastic demand. Overall, between 1997 and 2006, the effect of LIC trade on manufacturing PPI inflation was around two percentage points per year, far too large to be neglected in macroeconomic analysis.
AUTHORS: Auer, Raphael; Fischer, Andreas M.
DATE: 2008
Working Paper
The Globalisation of Inflation: the Growing Importance of Global Value Chains
Greater international economic interconnectedness over recent decades has been changing inflation dynamics. This paper presents evidence that the expansion of global value chains (GVCs), ie cross-border trade in intermediate goods and services, is an important channel through which global economic slack influences domestic inflation. In particular, we document the extent to which the growth in GVCs explains the established empirical correlation between global economic slack and national inflation rates, both across countries and over time. Accounting for the role of GVCs, we also find that the conventional tradebased measures of openness used in previous studies are poor proxies for this transmission channel. The results support the hypothesis that as GVCs expand, direct and indirect competition among economies increases, making domestic inflation more sensitive to the global output gap. This can affect the trade-offs that central banks face when managing inflation.
AUTHORS: Borio, Claudio; Filardo, Andrew J.; Auer, Raphael
DATE: 2017-01-01
Working Paper
Exchange rate pass-through in a competitive model of pricing-to-market
This paper extends the Mussa and Rosen (1978) model of quality-pricing under perfect competition. Exporters sell goods of different qualities to consumers who have heterogeneous preferences for quality. Production is subject to decreasing returns to scale and, therefore, supply and the toughness of competition react to cost changes brought about by exchange rate fluctuations. First, we predict that exchange rate shocks are imperfectly passed through into prices. Second, prices of low quality goods are more sensitive to exchange rate shocks than prices of high quality goods. Third, in response to an exchange rate appreciation, the composition of exports shifts towards higher quality and more expensive goods.> ; We test these predictions using highly disaggregated price and quantity U.S. import data. We find evidence that in response to an exchange rate appreciation, the composition of exports shifts towards high unit price goods. Therefore, exchange rate passthrough rates that are measured using aggregate data will tend to overstate the actual extent of pass-through.
AUTHORS: Chaney, Thomas; Auer, Raphael
DATE: 2009
Working Paper
Quality pricing-to-market
We document that in the European car industry, exchange rate pass-through is larger for low than for high quality cars. To rationalize this pattern, we develop a model of quality pricing and international trade based on the preferences of Mussa and Rosen (1978). Firms sell goods of heterogeneous quality to consumers that differ in their willingness to pay for quality. Each firm produces a unique quality of the good and enjoys local market power, which depends on the prices and qualities of its closest competitors. The market power of a firm depends on the prices and qualities of its direct competitors in the quality dimension. The top quality firm, being exposed to just one direct competitor, enjoys the highest market power and equilibrium markup. Because higher quality exporters are closer to the technological leader, markups are generally increasing in quality, exporting is relatively more profitable for high quality than for low quality firms, and the degree of exchange rate pass-through is decreasing in quality.
AUTHORS: Auer, Raphael; Chaney, Thomas; Saure, Philip
DATE: 2012