Based on a unique database consisting of hundreds of thousands of non-alcoholic beverage price records collected in about 800 supermarkets in France, we evaluate the impact on prices of the soda tax, an excise on drinks with added sugar or sweetener, introduced in January 2012 in France. We...

The paper contributes to the literature on the convergence of financial systems in the euro area by estimating household credit demand in individual countries. Using the ARDL framework advocated notably by Pesaran et al. (1999), the paper provides evidence on the convergence of long run credit...

The acceleration of the firm failure rate in France between 2008 and 2010 was preceded by a surge in the number of firms’ creations in 2003-2004. Therefore, identifying the impact of the 2008 crisis requires to distinguish, among the failures occurring over the period, those resulting from the...

Short-term increasing returns to production factors are usually found in empirical studies. We argue they can be due to omitted variables, particularly the intensity of factor utilisation. Thanks to original French firm-level data (1992-2008), we show how increasing returns to scale disappear...

This paper illustrates how a parsimonious macro-finance model can be exploited to investigate the frequency-domain properties of debt service implied by various financing srategies. This orginal approach is valuable to public debt managers seeking to assess the fiscal-hedging properties of the...

The analysis of seasonality in economics and the development of new seasonal adjustment procedures have been following new directions in the last twenty years. We study this question through the work performed at the Banque de France (Monetary Statistic and Studies Directorate) to compile new...

The paper analyzes the existence and impact of financing constraints as a possibly serious obstacle to innovation by .rms. The econometric framework we employ in our study is the simultaneous bivariate probit with mutual endogeneity of direct indicators of financial constraints and innovation...

Since July 2003, the Banque de France has been using seasonally adjusted (SA) data for the monthly reporting of national monetary developments, with renewed statistical tools. Before the start of the single currency in 1999, the Banque de France already calculated seasonally adjusted data, using...

Using two estimated models for the euro area and the United States, this paper investigates whether the observed difference in the amplitude of the interest rate cycle since 1999 in both areas is due to differences in the estimated monetary policy reaction function, differences in the structure...

This paper proposes two new coincident probabilistic cyclical indicators developed by the Bank of France in order to follow, on a monthly basis, the French economic activity. The first one is an indicator which aims at detecting the turning points of the acceleration cycle while the second one...