We study cross-country price differences in the European market for new passenger cars based on detailed pricing and technical data. Car prices in Europe converged until the year 2003, but not thereafter. Within the EU 15 countries the price range of the median model in 2004 was close to 20...

We consider a standard result of customer market theory: if firms have stable customer relations and face financial frictions, they may keep prices relatively high on their locked-in shoppers to maintain short-term profits at the expense of future market shares in times of low demand and vice...

We study the transmission of (unconventional) monetary policy to the real sector when firm decisions depend on both current and future credit market conditions. For a given level of current credit access, investment and employment increases more at firms expecting bank credit to improve in the...

This paper aims at investigating the relationship between firms' profit efficiency, access to finance and innovation activities. We enrich our understanding on firms' performance by adopting the stochastic frontier approach (SFA), which allows us to estimate profit functions and to obtain...

This paper provides novel information on the propagation of the pandemic-induced real shock to firms' financial conditions. It uses firm-level survey data from end February to early April 2020 for a large sample of euro area SMEs and large firms. Firms' expectations on the availability of credit...

The paper aims at investigating to what extent wage negotiation set-ups have shaped up firms’ response to the Great Recession, taking a firm-level cross-country perspective. We contribute to the literature by building a new micro-distributed database which merges data related to wage...

We investigate the impact of employment protection on firms' credit access by looking at both credit obtained from banks and firms' decision to apply for a loan. We find that greater flexibility in structuring the employees' working hours and in dismissing employees increases the probability...

Exploiting confidential data from the euro area, we show that sound banks can pass negative rates on to their corporate depositors without experiencing a contraction in funding. These pass-through effects become stronger as policy rates move deeper into negative territory. Banks offering...

This paper assesses the relative importance of perceived obstacles to hiring workers on a permanent basis faced by EU firms and studies how they depend on firm's characteristics. Findings suggest that the main obstacles to hiring in Europe are high uncertainty, shortage of skilled labour, high...

This paper studies the recent trends in nominal wage rigidity in a large group of EU countries, using survey data. We analyse two forms of nominal wage rigidity: downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) and the lagged response of wages to shocks. The frequency of wage changes, which is an indicator...