Appreciation Pressures and Real Depreciation: The Experience with the Swiss Franc-Euro Exchange Rate Floor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the course of the Swiss price level during the recent episode where Switzerland enforced a floor on the Swiss Franc exchange rate relative to the Euro. Given the strong nominal upward pressure on the Swiss currency the introduced limit of 1.20 Francs per Euro led to a quasi-fixed exchange rate from 2011 until early 2015. This measure was specifically aimed at helping the firms of the Swiss export sector to compete internationally. A further reason for imposing this floor was the Swiss National Bank’s concern with deflationary pressures. Interestingly, it turned out that during the episode with a quasi-fixed exchange rate the Swiss price level came under downward pressure. We offer an analysis that helps to understand this depreciation of the Swiss currency in real terms which in fact contributed to the exchange rate floor being eventually abandoned. The article thus clarifies some intricate mechanisms affecting the choice of exchange rate policies which are so important for firms in the export sector. As a theoretical contribution (complementing the well-known Balassa-Samuelson analysis) the article presents a computable equilibrium model that explains real exchange rate variations with diverging trends in the productivity growth of the non-traded goods sectors of economies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".