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Marlene Amstad (born September 20, 1968) is a Swiss economist and Professor of Practice in Economics and Finance at the School of Management and Economics (SME) at the Chinese University of Hongkong, Shenzhen and Co-Director of the Center for Financial Technology and Social Finance at the Shenzhen Finance Institute (SFI) where she conducts research on money, banking and Chinese financial markets. She serves as Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors at the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) and is chair-elect for the period of 2021-2023.

From 2011 to 2015, she served as Regional Advisor at the Bank of International Settlements in Hongkong where she worked with the 11 largest Asian central banks and coordinated EMEAP's Asian Bond Fund (ABF) initiative. From 2002 to 2004 and 2006 to 2011, she worked for the Swiss National Bank (SNB) where she was Deputy Director, Head of the Investment Strategy and Financial Market Analysis, and member of the investment committee for the bank's currency reserves. In 2004 and 2005, she worked with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where she developed a core inflation indicator for the U.S. which based on a broad data set, and that is currently published on a monthly basis. Before, she worked on quantitative Research and Credit Risk Management at Credit Suisse and as Researcher at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute (ETHZ).

Marlene Amstad is married and splits her time between Shenzhen, Hongkong and Switzerland.

Asset Management in China and the Emerging Markets
Marlene Amstad is initiator and co-editor of "The Handbook of China's Financial System", a reference book for investors, analysts, and policy makers compiled from articles from renown scholars and high-level policy officials. The Handbook covers a broad range of financial markets and gives a thorough introduction to the institutional set up in China.It tries to strike a balance between abstract principles, empirical analysis, and practitioner and policy-related insights and combines a thorough description of the mechanics of key instruments and its markets with an in-depth account of institutions. The message of each chapter is summarized in charts and tables and allow the readers to familiarize themselves with Chinese data. A preliminary version of which is currently available online for download and will be available as paperback through Princeton Press late in 2020.

In connection with her work at the Bank for International Settlements in Hongkong (BIS), Amstad published studies on sovereign risk, especially on how investors view such risks depending on currency and origin.

Her most recent research explores the possibilities of natural language processing with convolutional neural networks to derive signals and indicators relevant for policy makers and investors. One such example is a trade sentiment index based on Chinese media (social and conventional) which gauges how trade sentiment influences US and Chinese equity markets.

Work on Central Banking and Regulation of Financial Services
Marlene Amstad is credited with bringing forth a simple framework for the regulation of Fintech : inline with a technology-agnostic approach to the regulation of financial services, and with a reference to the duck-typing test in computer coding "If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck", financial services are regulated based on the functions they provide. Only if new functions emerge, the regulators have to decide whether to introduce new regulatory code or to except the new function from regulation. Otherwise, Fintech is treated the same as conventional financial services.

The New York Fed Staff Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG)
The indicator captures sustained movements in inflation from information contained in a broad set of price, real activity, and financial data. The algorithm adopts the methodology of a dynamic factor model as developed by Forni et al and extracts the lower frequency components of the time series. The indicator proved especially useful in detecting turning points in trend inflation and has shown higher forecast accuracy compared with other core inflation measures. It complements the inflation dashboard of policy makers and investors and is published monthly by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Underlying Inflation Gauge for China (CUIG)
As with the UIG for the US economy, the inflation gauge for China can be computed on a daily basis and uses a broad set of variables that potentially influence inflation. It is less noisy and closely tracks the headline CPI. When used for forecasting the headline CPI, CUIG outperforms traditional core measures. As an interesting side note, the working paper 2015/5 "Developing an underlying inflation gauge for China" with Ye Huan (叶欢) and Ma Guo Nan ( 马国南) is the first working paper in the history of the Peoples' Bank of China with a foreigner as the lead author.

Work on Business Cycle Turning Points
Amstad's early work at the KOF Swiss Economic Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology focused on indicators for business cycle turning points. In her Dissertation, she compared different internationally recognized methodologies and developed an early warning signal for business cycle turning point s of the Swiss economy based on time series analysis and Markow-Switching.

Selected Publications

 * co-editor and author with Wei Xiong and Sun Guofeng, "The Handbook of China's Financial System", forthcoming Princeton University Press, November 2020
 * with Leonardo Gambacorta, Chao He and Dora Xia, “Trade Sentiment in Chinese Media and Financial Markets“, forthcoming
 * co-editor with Bihong Huang, Peter J. Morgan, and Sayuri Shirai, “Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and Fintech in Asia“, Asian Development Bank Press, 2019, Paperback ISBN 9784899742135
 * with Frank Packer, Jimmy Shek, "Does sovereign risk in local and foreign currency differ?", Journal of International Money and Finance, Volume 101, March 2020, 102099
 * "Regulating Fintech: Objectives, Principles, and Practices“, in: “The Economics of Fintech and Digital Currencies”, Ed Antonio Fatas, CEPR ebook, 2019
 * “Regulating Fintech: Ignore, Duck-type or Code", in: “The Economics of Fintech and Digital Currencies”, Ed Antonio Fatas, CEPR ebook, 2019
 * with Zhiguo He, “China’s corporate defaults at record high – at last!“, VoxEU, 17 July 2019
 * with Zhiguo He, “Underestimated Role of Banks in China’s Bond Market“, VoxChina, 16 July 2019
 * "China kennt den Westen besser als der Westen China", Handelszeitung Interview, Februar 2019
 * with Simon Potter, Robert Rich, "The New York Fed Staff Underlying Inflation Gauge (UIG)", FRBYNY Policy Review, December 2017
 * with Eli Remolona and Jimmy Shek, "How do global investors differentiate between sovereign risks? The new normal versus the old", Journal of International Money and Finance, vol. 66(C), pages 32-48, 2016
 * with Ye Huan and Ma Guo Nan, "Developing an underlying inflation gauge for China/建立中国基础通货膨胀指标,", PBC working paper No. 2015/05, also BOFIT working paper 11/2018
 * "Business Cycle Turning Points: Dating and Forecasting – Chronology of different types of turning points and development of an early warning system based on Markov switching models of Swiss survey data", Ph.D. thesis University of St. Gallen, 1999