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...

This paper studies firms' price-setting decision during a currency changeover. Buyers' difficulties with the new nominal price level create incentives to raise prices temporarily but doing so comes at the risk of damaging a seller's reputation in the long run. We model firms' trade-off and study...

This paper presents original evidence on price setting in the euro area at the individual level. We use micro data on consumer (CPI) and producer (PPI) prices, as well as survey information. Our main findings are: (i) prices in the euro area are sticky and more so than in the US; (ii) there is...

This paper explores how different types of financial regulation could combat many of the phenomena that were observed in the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009. The primary contribution is the introduction of a model that includes both a banking system and a “shadow banking system” that each...

We document the presence of both small and large price changes in individual price records from the CPI in France and the US. After correcting for measurement error and cross-section heterogeneity, the size-distribution of price changes has a positive excess kurtosis. We propose an analytical...

This paper explores convergence in higher-order beliefs - otherwise called eductive stability - when coordination is sequential, that is, when each agent of a given type fixes his own actions after observing the ones of earlier types in a given order. The presence of sequential types enhances...

Under the classical gold standard (1880-1914), the Bank of France maintained a stable discount rate while the Bank of England changed its rate very frequently. Why did the policies of these central banks, the two pillars of the gold standard, differ so much? How did the Bank of France manage to...

This paper is a first attempt to connect the heterogeneity in bank efficiency with lending fluctuations and allocation efficiency : there is a trade-off between the two in the presence of heterogeneity in bank monitoring efficiency. The mechanism at hand is twofold. (a) First the rent extracted...

We highlight different stylized facts concerning wage stickiness. First, in France, the typical duration of a wage agreement is one year. Consequently, a Taylor (1980) -type model appears to reproduce appropriately the distribution of agreement durations. Some 30 percent of settlements stipulate...

We investigate the stability of M3 income velocity in the euro area. We apply a set of breakpoint procedures to examine this issue and conclude that at least one structural change occurred around 2000-2001. We also find evidence of another structural break around 1992-1993. These two breaks seem...