This study investigates the pricing behaviour of firms in the euro area on the basis of surveys conducted by nine Eurosystem national central banks, covering more than 11,000 firms. The results, robust across countries, show that firms operate in monopolistically competitive markets, where...

Monetary policy aims at affecting corporate borrowing by influencing the marginal costs of firms, but its potency can be conditioned by the degree of market competition. We first identify conditions under which changes in marginal costs may have different effects on credit constraints and output...

Price inflation in the euro area has been stable and low since the Global Financial Crisis, despite notable changes in output and unemployment. We show that an increasing share of high markup firms is part of the explanation of why inflation remained stubbornly stable and low in the euro area...

A growing body of literature indicates that competition increases bank soundness. Applying an industrial organization based approach to large data sets for European and U.S. banks, we offer new empirical evidence that efficiency plays a key role in the transmission from competition to soundness....

We investigate which variables have supported growth in the euro area over the last 30 years. This is a challenging task due to dimensionality problems: a large set of potential determinants, limited data, and the prospect that some variables could be non-stationary. We assemble a set of 35...

We study the relationship between banks' size and risk-taking in the context of supranational banking supervision. Consistently with theoretical work on banking unions and in contrast to analyses emphasising incentives under- pinned by the too-big-to-fail effect, we find an inverse relationship...

This paper investigates the impact of ECB communication of its assessment of the economic outlook on ex-ante inflation uncertainty and sheds light on how central bank information shocks operate. The paper finds that ECB communication of new outlook information not only reduces professional...

This paper develops a Bayesian quantile regression model with time-varying parameters (TVPs) for forecasting in ation risks. The proposed parametric methodology bridges the empirically established benefits of TVP regressions for forecasting in ation with the ability of quantile regression to...