This paper examines whether multinational companies differ in their employment adjustment from domestic firms, on the basis of a panel of Belgian firms for the period 1997-2007. We focus on incumbent firms as, in general, they account for the largest fraction of net employment creation,...

This paper presents a simple model of state-dependent pricing that allows identifying the relative importance of both nominal and real factors in price rigidity. Using two rich datasets consisting of a large fraction of the price quotes used to compute the Belgian and French Consumer Price...

This paper revisits the "footloose" nature of multinational firms (MNFs) hypothesis. Using firm-level data for Belgium over the period 1997-2008, we rely on a Probit model and take into account the endogeneity of the determinants of firm exit. Our results may be summarised as follows. First, the...

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...

In this paper we investigate how demand and output price uncertainty affect investment plans of Belgian manufacturing firms. We obtain time-varying uncertainty measures at the firm and industry level from the Belgian monthly business cycle survey and investment plans from the half-yearly...

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 price...

We test whether firms with a single bank are better shielded from loss of credit and investment cuts in periods of adverse cash flow shocks than firms with multiple bank relationships. Our estimates of the cash flow sensitivity of investment show that both types of firms are equally subject to...

This paper evaluates the extent of downward nominal and real wage rigidity for different categories of workers and firms using the methodology recently developed by the International Wage Flexibility Project (Dickens and Goette, 2006). The analysis is based on an administrative data set on...

This paper decomposes wage bill changes at the firm level into components due to wage changes, and components due to net flows of employment. The analysis relies on an administrative employer-employee dataset of individual annual earnings matched with firms' annual accounts for Belgium over the...

This paper examines whether differences in wage rigidity across sectors can be explained by differences in workforce composition, competition, technology and wage-bargaining institutions. We adopt the measure of downward real wage rigidity (DRWR) developed by Dickens and Goette (2006) and rely...