This study focuses on the impact of financial inclusion and bank concentration on the performance of firms in developing and emerging countries. Using firm-level data for a sample of 55,596 firms in 79 countries, we find that financial inclusion, i.e. the distribution of financial services...

This paper explores the impact of foreign aid on firm growth for a panel of 4,342 firms in 29 developing countries, 11 of which are in Africa. Using the World Bank Enterprise Surveys data and controlling for firm fixed effects, we find a positive impact of foreign aid on firms' sales growth....

Euro area countries as a whole have experienced a marked downward trend over the 1980s. Over this period, the unemployment rate has increased and economic activity has been sluggish. Changes in the implicit inflation target, viewed as low frequency movements of inflation, might possibly explain...

The present paper investigates the dynamic effects of disinflation shocks for a number of real macroeconomic variables in the euro area. Using structural VARs, we identify disinflation shocks as the only shocks that can exert a long-run effect on inflation as well as other nominal variables...

Using CPI micro data for 11 euro area countries covering about 60% of the euro area consumption basket over the period 2010-2019, we document new findings on consumer price rigidity in the euro area: (i) each month on average 12.3% of prices change (vs 19.3% in the United States); when we...

Central banks are often reluctant to take immediate or forceful actions in the face of new information on the economic outlook. To rationalize this cautious approach, Brainard’s attenuation principle is often invoked: when a policy-maker is unsure of the effects of his policies, he should...

In RBC models, “disaster risk shocks” reproduce countercyclical risk premia but generate an increase in consumption along the recession and asset price fall, through their effects on agents' preferences (Gourio, 2012). This paper offers a solution to this puzzle by developing a New Keynesian...

In this paper, we present the new model developed at Banque de France to forecast the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) and its components in France up to twelve quarters during the Eurosystem projection exercises. The model is a partial equilibrium model and is used for forecast...

We characterize the dispersion of grocery prices in France based on a large original data set of prices in more than 1500 supermarkets. On average across products, the 90th percentile of relative prices is 17 percentage points higher than the 10th and the mean absolute deviation from quarterly...

The decline in the sensitivity of inflation to domestic slack observed in developed countries over the last 25 years has been often attributed to globalization. However, this intuition has so far not been formalized. I develop a general equilibrium setup that can rationalize the flattening of...