This paper explores the statistical properties of household consumption-expenditurebudget share distributions —defined as the share of household total expenditure spentfor purchasing a specific category of commodities— for a large sample of Italianhouseholds in the period 1989-2004. We find...

Liquidity provision through its repo auctions has been one of the main instrumentsof the European Central Bank (ECB) to address the recent tensions infinancial markets since summer 2007. In this paper, we analyse banks’ biddingbehaviour in the ECB’s main refinancing operations (MROs) during...

We assess the sustainability of public finances in OECD countries, over the period 1970-2010, using unit root and cointegration analysis, both country and panel based, controlling for endogenous breaks. Results notably show: lack of cointegration – absence of sustainability – between...

We present empirical evidence of the extent of wage rigidity in the euro area and European countries derived from longitudinal data on individuals. Wage rigidity is measured by the elasticity of individual real wages with respect to local unemployment. The results suggest that the elasticity is...

This paper examines two competing approaches for calculating current account benchmarks, i.e. the external sustainability approach á la Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (LM) versus the structural current accounts literature (SCA) based on panel econometric techniques. The aim is to gauge the medium...

Embedding the efficient bargaining model into the Hall (1988) approach for estimating price-cost margins shows that both imperfections in the product and labor markets generate a wedge between factor elasticities in the production function and their corresponding shares in revenue. This article...

Using individual firm data, this study analyzes the credit channel in Austria. The estimation is based on an accelerator specification of investment demand augmented by the liquidity ratio and a firm specific user cost of capital. The results show that there is a credit channel in Austria...

This paper investigates the determinants of currency invoicing in international trade. Although the currency of invoicing is central for the transmission of monetary policy, empirical research on this topic is scarce due to a lack of data. With a new extensive invoicing dataset and a panel model...

Aggregate loan development typically hinges on a combination of factors that impact simultaneously on the demand and the supply side of bank lending. The financial turmoil starting in mid-2007 had detrimental consequences for banks’ balance-sheets, cost of funds and profitability, thus...

We propose a dynamic factor model for mixed-measurement and mixed-frequency panel data. In this framework time series observations may come from a range of families of parametric distributions, may be observed at different time frequencies, may have missing observations, and may exhibit common...