The paper identifies the business models followed by banks in the euro area, utilising a proprietary dataset collected in the context of the supervisory reporting of the Single Supervisory Mechanism. The concept of a 'business model' has been neglected by economic theory and is defined here with...

Using a large panel of 6,946 French manufacturing firms, this paper investigates the effect of monetary policy on investment from 1990 to 1999 through the cost-of-capital and the cash-flow channels. We compare several specifications of neo-classical demand for capital, taking into account...

This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on firms' investment behaviour. The analysis relies on a comprehensive database of Belgian firms covering all sectors of economic activity and firms of all sizes. We proceed in two steps. First, we estimate a reduced-form investment equation...

This paper investigates the transmission of monetary policy using data from a panel of Luxembourg firms. The results indicate that the sales accelerator may be at work. A very robust result is the negative effect of the user cost of capital on firms' investment ratio. Changes in user costs are...

The Boskin report (1996) concluded that the US consumer price index (CPI) overestimated the inflation by 1.1 percentage points. This was due to several measurement errors in the CPI. One of them is called quality change bias. We compare two methods in this paper which can be used to correct for...

This paper examines the degree of price rigidity in Belgian consumer prices, using a large database. As to the observed degree of rigidity, the results reveal a substantial amount of heterogeneity, not only across but also within product categories. While prices turn out to be perfectly flexible...

We estimate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms’ investment decisions from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms’ subjective qualitative expectations. They are close to their theoretical counterparts, the variances of future demand and...

This paper investigates the behaviour of consumer prices in Italy by looking at micro data in the attempt to obtain a quantitative measure of the unconditional degree of price rigidity in the Italian economy. The analysis focuses on the monthly frequency of price changes and on the duration of...

Based on individual price records collected for the computation of the Austrian CPI, average frequencies of price changes and durations of price spells are estimated to characterize price setting in Austria. Depending on the estimation method, prices are unchanged for 10 to 14 months on average....

This paper shows that adjustment costs modelled as firing costs of moderate size go a long way in explaining the variability and counter-cyclicality of the labour share at the firm and aggregate level. Firing costs cause firms to hire less in recessions and hire less in booms causing wage costs...