Abstract This paper presents novel survey evidence on how firms set prices across the private-sector Swiss economy. The survey covers all stages of the price-setting process and reveals substantial heterogeneity by sector, firm size, customer type, and sales channel. Firms combine time- and state-dependent elements when reviewing prices. Competitor-based pricing dominates over markup rules, and price discrimination is multidimensional and widespread. Price changes occur far less frequently than reviews, are typically synchronized within firms, and exhibit a slightly upward-sloping hazard of adjustment. Cost pass-through is driven mainly by labor, supplier, and raw material costs, with asymmetric responses to cost versus demand shocks. Price rigidity arises primarily from implicit and explicit contracts and cost-based pricing, while operational frictions such as menu costs play only a minor role.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic caused a deep recession globally, as well as in the euro area, accompanied by a steep decline in inflation rates in 2020. This paper reviews some of the main challenges created by the pandemic for inflation measurement and provides micro price data analysis of how price setting has reacted to the strong COVID-19 shock. For this purpose, we use three different, but complementary, microdata sources for specific countries and sectors: micro price data underlying the official consumer price indices in Germany, Italy, Latvia and Slovakia; (scanner) data from German and Italian supermarkets; and online (web-scraped) prices for Poland. A common finding of the micro price studies in this paper is that state dependence significantly contributed to the price-setting response to the COVID-19 shock. Nevertheless, the extent and degree of responses varies widely by sector and even country, also depending on the severity of the pandemic situation.

We compare supermarket price setting in the US and the euro area and assess its impact on food inflation. We introduce a novel scanner dataset of Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Italy (EA4) and contrast it with an equivalent dataset from the US. We find that both higher frequency and stronger state dependence of price changes contribute to higher flexibility of supermarket inflation in the US relative to the euro area. We argue that the driving force behind both factors is higher cross-sectional volatility in the US. Larger product-level fluctuations both force retailers to adjust prices more frequently and increase price misalignments, which increase the selection of large price changes. Both facts are well represented by a mildly state-dependent price-setting model, and they jointly explain over a third of the difference in food-inflation volatility between the US and the euro area as well as around a third of the difference between the inflation responses to the COVID-19 shock in Germany and Italy. (c) 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We provide new evidence on price rigidity at the product level based on microdata underlying the Swiss consumer price index from 2008 to 2020. We find that the frequency of price changes has increased over the last decade, particularly among products where collection switched to online prices, reflecting the rise of e-commerce. Furthermore, price changes tend to be synchronized within rather than across stores. Time variations in inflation can be attributed mainly to variations in the frequency of both price increases and price decreases. In the first year of the pandemic, the frequency of price adjustments changed little on average, while temporary sales responded countercyclically to the respective demand conditions across sectors.

This text summarises the 2021 spring forecast of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, dated 25 March 2021. We first discuss recent economic developments abroad and in Switzerland. We then present the main forecast results across the various sectors of the economy, decomposed into the main demand components of GDP. The final section consists of a comprehensive data appendix.

This text summarises the 2021 summer forecast of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, dated 22 June 2021. The first chapter discusses recent economic developments in Switzerland. The second presents the main forecast results across the various sectors of the economy, decomposed into the main demand components of GDP. The third chapter discusses the most important forecast results for the international economy. The final chapter consists of a comprehensive data appendix.

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.

This text summarises the 2020 spring forecast of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, dated 17 March, 2020. We first discuss the extraordinary circumstances due to the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic. After this, we focus on the recent economic developments abroad and in Switzerland. We then present the main forecast results across the various sectors of the Swiss economy. The final section consists of a comprehensive data appendix

This text summarises the 2020 winter forecast of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, dated 15 December 2020. The first chapter discusses recent economic developments in Switzerland. The second presents the main forecast results across the various sectors of the economy, decomposed into the main demand components of GDP. The third chapter discusses the most important forecast results for the international economy. The final section consists of a comprehensive data appendix.

In solid-state pulsed power systems based on switching converters often a low amplitude, high frequency ripple current is superimposed on the high flat-top pulse current. Despite its low amplitude (usually measured in ppm) the ripple current could have a major impact on the performance of the system and therefore needs to be quantified/reduced. However, measuring such currents is challenging, due to the limited resolution of the current probe, especially when the DC offset current of the pulse is in the kA range. Therefore a suitable AC current probe able to perform magnified ripple current measurements with high fidelity is proposed in this paper. The probe is based on the principle of current transformers and filters the DC offset of the pulsed current, enabling to measure the ripple with a very high resolution. The design trade-offs of the conventional CT for such an application are explained, and an adaptive burden resistance topology is proposed in order to achieve simultaneously a low settling time, which is essential for measuring short pulses, and the needed high sensitivity, while maintaining a relatively high bandwidth.

This text summarises the 2019 autumn forecast of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, released on 2 October 2019. We first discuss recent economic developments abroad and in Switzerland. We then present the main forecast results across the various sectors of the economy. After this, we discuss the most important forecast results for the global economy. The final section consists of a comprehensive data appendix.

This is a summary of the 2019 winter forecast for Switzerland, released by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich on 12 December 2019, with a forecast horizon up to the end of 2021.