This paper describes a forecasting model of the French consumer price index. Its purpose is to allow for rapid and detailed analysis of recent inflation developments, as well as frequent forecasts. Its characteristics are therefore the following: a small number of equations, a monthly frequency,...

We study in this paper a forecasting model for long-term rates based both on the arbitrage-free hypothesis and the agents' rationality. The long-term rate is expressed as an average of expected short-term rates, which are modelized according to three models: two univariate models (with...

We investigate in this paper the ability of the yield spread to forecast economic activity in Germany, the United States and France. Two approaches are implemented. The first one, widely used, consists in regressing the growth rate of the GDP computed on various horizons on the yield spread. In...

This paper presents a comparison of alternative indicators of underlying inflation in the French case. Four broad measures are considered and implemented the first two of which are inflation excluding food and energy and the trimmed inflation indicator. We then implement two methods relying on...

We use a French firm-level panel data set over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is countercyclical...

This paper proposes a model in the spirit of Aghion et al. (2005) that encompasses the magnitude of the impact of competition on R&D according to the cost of the innovation. The effect of competition on R&D is an inverted U-shape. However, the shape is flatter and competition policy is therefore...