Welcome to retailindex.ch!

This website was created as a one-stop-shop for everyone interested in using payment transaction data to monitoring turnover in the retail trade and services sector.

By following the instructions on this page, you should be able to reproduce and adjuste the Worldline - University of St. Gallen - Retail Trade and Services Index, or WLD-UNISG-RTSI for short.

This project was created as part of my thesis for my Master in Economics at the University of St. Gallen with a specialization in Digitization and Data Analytics.

It is an outgrowth of the project Monitoring Consumption Switzerland, a joint initiative of the University of St. Gallen, the University of Lausanne–E4S, and Novalytica, supported by SIX, Worldline as well as the Swiss Payments Association.

Please note that the opinions expressed herein reflect those of the author and not necessarily those of the University of St. Gallen or of the project Monitoring Consumption Switzerland.

This is a public repository with an MIT license, allowing anyone to modify and distribute this software and associated documentation files as long as the corresponding copyright notice and permission are included.

I highly encourage anyone to improve my work and I intend to update this site regularly. An interactive applicaition using Shiny is currently under construction and should go live by December 2021.

For questions and comments, please do not hesitate to contact me under via email!

Please find some useful resources below:

The Economist about the real time revolution in economics

• What real-time indicators suggest about Omicron’s economic impact
• Instant economics - A real-time revolution will up-end the practice of macroeconomics
• The real-time revolution - How the pandemic reshaped the dismal science
• Real-time danger. Why real-time economic data need to be treated with caution

Nowcasting retail sales using payment transaction data

• Card spending dynamics in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Tracking the COVID-19 crisis with high-resolution transaction data
• From transactions data to economic statistics: Constructing real-rime, high-frequency, geographic measures of consumer spending
• Dankort payments as a timely indicator of retail sales in Denmark

Seasonal adjustment of daily time series

• Seasonal adjustment with X-13ARIMA-SEATS in R by Christoph Sax and Dirk Eddelbuettel
• Seasonal adjustment of daily time series by Daniel Ollech
• Automatic forecasting procedure by Sean Taylor and Ben Letham
• Workday, holiday and calendar adjustment with 21st century data: Monthly aggregates from daily diesel fuel purchases
• Using Daily Payment Processor Data to Determine Existence and Length of Retail Shopping Event Effects
• Modeling of Holiday Effects and Seasonality in Daily Time Series

Payment behavior in Switzerland

• Project Monitoring Consumption Switzerland
• Swiss Payment Monitor by Sandro Graf and Tobias Trütsch
• Survey on Payment Methods by the Swiss National Bank
• An examination of the economics of payment card systems by David Maurer

Academic writing

• Academic Phrasebank by the University of Manchester
• Writing tips for PhD students by John H. Cochrane
• NZZ Visuals Styleguide
• Overleaf templates
• Better BibTeX for Zotero by Emiliano Heyns

COVID-19 Data Hub

• COVID-19 Data Hub by Emanuele Guidotti, David Ardia, and Will Rowe

Learning R

• Mastering Shiny by Hadley Wickham
• Mastering Shiny Solutions by Maya Gans, Harly Gotti, and Howard Baek
• Forecasting: Principles and Practice by Rob J Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos
• Advanced R by Hadley Wickham
• Advanced R Solutions by Malte Grosser, Henning Bumann & Hadley Wickham