This paper uses disaggregated CPI time series to show that a break in the mean of French inflation occurred in the mid-eighties and that the 1983 monetary policy shift mostly accounted for it. CPI average yearly growth declined from nearly 11% before the break date (May 1985) to 2.1% after. No...

This paper reports the results of a survey conducted by the Banque de France during winter 2003-2004 to investigate the price-setting behavior of French manufacturing companies. Prices are found to adjust infrequently; the median firm modifies its price only once a year. Price reviews are more...

In this paper, using US as well as French sectoral data and indicators of price rigidity, we re-examine the (lack of) relation between price stickiness and inflation persistence. This has recently been put forward by Bils and Klenow (2004) as evidence against time-dependent price setting models....

In this paper, we seek to estimate the sacrifice ratio of the euro area using a small DSGE model where prices and wages are sticky. We estimate model's parameters so as to minimize the distance between VAR-based and model-based covariances of a set of variables. The estimated value of the...

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...

For few years, the increasing size of available economic and financial databases has led econometricians to develop and adapt new methods in order to efficiently summarize information contained in those large datasets. Among those methods, dynamic factor models have known a rapid development and...

This paper illustrates how a parsimonious macro-finance model can be exploited to investigate the frequency-domain properties of debt service implied by various financing srategies. This orginal approach is valuable to public debt managers seeking to assess the fiscal-hedging properties of the...

The analysis of seasonality in economics and the development of new seasonal adjustment procedures have been following new directions in the last twenty years. We study this question through the work performed at the Banque de France (Monetary Statistic and Studies Directorate) to compile new...

The paper analyzes the existence and impact of financing constraints as a possibly serious obstacle to innovation by .rms. The econometric framework we employ in our study is the simultaneous bivariate probit with mutual endogeneity of direct indicators of financial constraints and innovation...

Since July 2003, the Banque de France has been using seasonally adjusted (SA) data for the monthly reporting of national monetary developments, with renewed statistical tools. Before the start of the single currency in 1999, the Banque de France already calculated seasonally adjusted data, using...