This paper documents the existence and main patterns of inter-industry wage differentials across a large number of industries for eight EU countries at two points in time (in general 1995 and 2002) and explores possible explanations for these patterns. The analysis uses the European Structure of...

Based on an ad hoc firm-level survey on wage and pricing policies conducted in a large number of European countries, this study finds that about 60% of firms change base wages once a year with some clustering of wage changes observed in January. Differences in the frequency of wage changes...

The relationships among competition in the financial sector, access of firms to external financ-ing, and associated economic growth are ambiguous in theory. Moreover, measuring competi-tion in the financial sector can be complex. In this paper we first estimate for 16 countries an industrial...