In this paper, we investigate the effect of real estate prices on productive investment. We build a simple theoretical framework of firms' investment with credit rationing and real estate collateral. We show that real estate prices affect firms' borrowing capacities through two channels. An...

Through a time-varying VAR model with drifting parameters and stochastic volatilities (Cogley and Sargent, 2005, Primiceri, 2005), we explore nonlinearities on the French housing and credit markets, which give rich insights on the persistent bubble of the 2000s. While the price increase took...

Over the last decade, France and Spain have experienced property price and residential investment increases which were among the strongest and the lengthiest in the euro area. Although the quality of the underlying data limits the precision of the estimates, the present paper aims at analysing...

Studies of firm-level data have shown that there is a huge dispersion of productivity across firms even when industries are narrowly defined. So there is a significant opportunity for the least productive firms to catch up to the most productive. The formers’ convergence could therefore...

We use firm-level data for France and Italy to explore the impact of service regulation reform implemented in the two countries on the mark-up and eventually on the performance of firms between the second half of the 1990s and 2007. In line with some previous studies, we find that the relation...

This paper studies the effect of credit constraints on the expansion and survival of firms in foreign markets. It develops a model in which, lower access to external finance, or reduced internal liquidity, hampers the firm ability to finance the recurrent costs to serve foreign markets and...

This analysis characterizes empirically how good labour relations can alleviate the negative impact on productivity of regulatory constraints or workforce opposition. Our evidence of good labour relations lies in the existence of binding collective agreements, at the firm or at the industry...

The share of retail sales made via distance selling has increased steadily, driven by Internet sales. Meanwhile, a large body of research has been devoted to measuring the impact of online shopping on consumer prices. These studies are based primarily on microeconomic data and they reveal...

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...