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Welcome to the personal website of Dr. Christoph Basten, FRM.

I am an economist trained at Oxford, Pompeu Fabra, Harvard, and the European University Institute. My professional experience spans both policy and academia. In policy, I have worked on bank risk management at the Swiss Banking Supervision (FINMA) and contributed to the preparation of monetary policy at the European Central Bank. In academia, I have held research and teaching positions at ETH Zurich and as Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich, where I am currently (Spring Semester 2026) a Visiting Fellow. Information on my plans from Summer 2026 will be added shortly.

My recent research focuses on interactions across products within bank–client relationships, which I conceptualize as cross-selling in financial services. In Basten and Juelsrud (2023), we document the quantitative importance of cross-selling and its implications for product pricing, bank profitability, and household welfare. Building on this, Basten and Juelsrud (2025) shows how such linkages shape monetary policy transmission. Basten, Cucic, and Schepens (2026) examine how transmission depends on whether depositors also hold securities (stocks, bonds, or funds) with their bank, while Acharya, Basten, Juelsrud, and Liaudinskas analyze the implications of cross-selling for bank liquidity risk.

Earlier in my career, I worked on topics including labor markets, tax policy, industrial organization, banking regulation, negative interest rate policy, and inflation expectations.

For further information, please see my LinkedIn, Google Scholar, ORCID, or SSRN profiles. To get in touch, you can email me at cc.basten@gmail.com 

Recent News:

February 2026: Our paper on Market-Priced Savings is now available here. It shows that you can expect to earn higher interest on your deposits if you also invest in stocks, bonds or investment funds. Check it out.

November 2025: Why did your bank pass through central banks'  2022-23 policy rate hikes to your deposit rates only incompletely? And reversely, why do you still earn positive deposit interest even when your bank has to pay negative interest on the deposits raised from you? Check out the new SUERF Policy Brief, VoxEU column or ECB Research Bulletin by R. Juelsrud and myself to find out!

October 2025: On Oct. 27, I am presenting at the ChaMP workshop in Malta my research joint with D. Cucic and G. Schepens on "Market-Priced Savings" (MPS), i.e. on non-deposit financial assets including stocks, bonds and funds.

June 2025: Research joint with Merike Kukk (Eesti Pank) and Jan Toczynski (QMU London) "Beyond the Headline: How Personal Inflation Exposure Shapes Households’ Financial Choices", has been accepted by the Journal of Monetary Economics. It shows individuals to adjust consumption and saving to personal beyond headline inflation.

March 2025: Check out program and live stream of the Swiss Financial Intermediation Conference I am co-organizing in Gerzensee this March 30 - April 2!

July 2024: After 7 years as banking professor, I am now back to policy at the European Central Bank.

May 2024: May 5-8 shall see the Swiss Conference on Financial Intermediation which I co-organize with Martin Brown, Andreas Fuster and Sebastian Doerr at Gerzensee. For those who can't make it onsite, sessions will be live-streamed.

April 2024: Presenting "Monetary Policy Transmission through Cross-Selling Banks", joint with R. Juelsrud, at the Inaugural Conference of the Eurosystem network "Challenges for Monetary Policy Transmission" on April 25.  Presentation videos available also ex post here.

October 2023: Highlights this month include an invited discussion at the ECB-IMF Conference on Macroprudential Policy (Oct 17-18), and a paper presentation at at 2023 Münster Workshop on Banking Research (Oct 27-28).

September 2023: Visiting NYU Stern until the UZH semester start.

August 2023b: In the Review of Financial Studies (RFS) here, R. Juelsrud and myself have just published work establishing the importance of cross-selling in bank relationships. Check out the findings and the many implications this has for households, firms, banks and policy-makers!

August 2023: The new SFI Roundup, to which I contributed a small portion of the insights, discusses prospects for the Swiss Real Estate market.

July 2023: Presenting on July 7 at the "Money and Finance Research" (MoFiR) Conference in Naples, and on August 23 at the CEPR ES Conference of Financial Intermediation in Athens!

June 2023: Presenting on June 2 at the FIRS Conference in Vancouver!

May 2023: On May 10, Professors Mettler, Ongena and myself will be discussing our updated SFI Meta Index on Financial Regulation here.

April 2023: Join Alexander Wagner and myself for an interesting discussion on crisis resilience of Swiss finance at the UZH Center for Crisis Competence on April 25!

October 2022: I look forward to presenting ongoing work on FinTech at the upcoming FinTech Symposium of the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on November 7-8.

September 2022: I present at the Federal Reserve Board on Sep. 14 and at the FDIC Bank Research Conference on Sep. 15/16, both onsite in Washington, DC.

July 2022: On July 1, I present at the WEA-IBEFA in Portland, OR.

June 2022: I organize an UZH Conference on Banks and Central Banks on June 15.

May 2022: On June 10, I discuss the future of Swiss banking with former Swiss foreign minister Micheline Calmy-Rey and with Blockchain and Fintech expert Ante Plazibat upon invitation of Switzerland's biggest provider of banking software Finnova.

April 2022: We present our updated SFI Global Financial Regulation Index at the "Fédération des Entreprises Romandes Genève" (FER) in Geneva on April 27.

January 2022: After my Fall Semester visit of NYU Stern School of Business, I am now back in Zurich and looking forward to upcoming seminar presentations at the SNB (February 4), IMF (February 7), UZH (February 28), FINMA (March 22), SWCFI (April 4), ECB (May 10), SFI  (13 June), UFSP Financial Market Regulation, WEA-IBEFA (1 July).