We use Portuguese firm-level data to investigate whether changes in resource misallocation may have contributed to the poor economic performance of some southern and peripheral European countries leading up to the Eurozone crisis. We extend Hsieh and Klenow's (2009) methodology to include...

This paper discusses the identification of the determinants of downward wage rigidity and provides new empirical evidence concerning its importance in Europe. It is shown that the models estimated so far in the literature suffer from econometric problems that prevent the contributions of those...

This note provides a structural interpretation for the index of price changes synchronization proposed by Fisher and Konieczny (2000, Economics Letters, 68, 271-277) and shows that it can be used to test the hypothesis of uniform staggering.

This paper identifies the empirical stylized features of price setting behaviour in Portugal using the micro-datasets underlying the consumer and the producer price indexes. The main conclusions are the following: 1 in every 4 prices change each month; there is a considerable degree of...

In this paper we critically reappraise some measures of the importance of time-dependent price setting rules and propose an alternative way to gauge the significance of this type of price setting behaviour. The merits of the proposed measure are highlighted in an application using micro-data....

This paper documents producer price setting in 6 countries of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. It collects evidence from available studies on each of those countries and also provides new evidence. These studies use monthly producer price data. The following...

This paper documents patterns of price setting at the retail level in the euro area. A set of stylized facts on the frequency and size of price changes is presented along with an econometric investigation of their main determinants. Price adjustment in the euro area can be summarized in six...

This paper elaborates on the alternative measure of persistence recently suggested in Marques (2004), which is based on the idea of mean reversion. A formal distinction between the “unconditional probability of a given process not crossing its mean in period t” and its estimator, is made...

In this paper we analyse the ability of time and state dependent price setting rules to explain durations of price spells or the probability of changing prices.Our results suggest that simple time dependent models cannot be seen as providing a reasonable approximation to the data and that state...

Infrequent price changes at the firm level are now well documented in the literature. However, a number of issues remain partly unaddressed. This paper contributes to the literature on price stickiness by investigating the lags of price adjustments to different types of shocks. We find that...