This paper documents producer price setting in 6 countries of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. It collects evidence from available studies on each of those countries and also provides new evidence. These studies use monthly producer price data. The following...

Using a large panel of about 6,946 French manufacturing firms, this paper investigates the effect of monetary policy from 1990 to 1999 on investment through the cost of capital and the cash-flow channels. We compare several specifications of the neo-classical demand for capital, taking into...

This paper presents original evidence on price setting in the euro area at the individual level. We use micro data on consumer (CPI) and producer (PPI) prices, as well as survey information. Our main findings are: (i) prices in the euro area are sticky and more so than in the US; (ii) there is...

We uncover technological standardization as a microeconomic mechanism which is vital for the implementation of new technologies, in particular general purpose technologies. The interdependencies of these technologies require common rules (“standardization”) to ensure compatibility. Using...

This study investigates the pricing behaviour of firms in the euro area on the basis of surveys conducted by nine Eurosystem national central banks, covering more than 11,000 firms. The results, robust across countries, show that firms operate in monopolistically competitive markets, where...

This paper examines the art of central banking as practised by the European Central Bank (ECB) through the prism of Goodfriend's (2009) determination of the three policies that fall within the remit of a central bank: monetary policy, which consists in varying the size of the balance sheet,...

This paper analyses information from survey data collected in the framework of the Eurosystem's Wage Dynamics Network (WDN) on patterns of firm-level adjustment to shocks. We document that the relative intensity and the character of price vs. cost and wage vs. employment adjustments in response...

The paper focuses on the influence of upstream competition for productivity outcomes in downstream sectors. This relation is illustrated with a neo-Schumpeterian theoretical model of innovation (Aghion et al., 1997) with market imperfections in the production of intermediate goods. In this...

We investigate the wage-setting behavior of French companies using an ad-hoc survey conducted specifically for this study. Our main results are the following. i) Wages are changed infrequently. The mean duration of wage contracts is one year. Wage changes occur at regular intervals during the...

This paper aims at providing causal evidence on the effects of expanded imported varieties on total factor productivity (TFP) using French firm level data. Our strategy is to build an exact index of increase in varieties -using the Broda, Greenfield and Weinstein (2006) methodology. This index...