The centralised wage agreements have helped to contain inflation. There is evidence that wage increases were more moderate when a central agreement was concluded than in periods when no central agreement was reached. Nevertheless, there is also evidence that centralised wage setting has had some...

Using an ad-hoc survey at the firm level, we investigate the determinants of wage and price-setting practices in Czech firms, the presence and sources of wage rigidity, and reactions of firms to hypothetical shocks. Although the evidence of downward wage rigidity is not widespread, we find...

Using survey-based measures of future U.S. economic activity from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we study how changes in expectations and their interaction with monetary policy contribute to fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates. We find that changes in...

We investigate the wage-setting behavior of French companies using an ad-hoc survey specifically conducted for this study. Our main results are the following. i) Wages are changed infrequently. 75% of firms change their wages once a year. Wage changes occur at regular intervals during the year...

This article is based on the results of a survey conducted among 731 Austrian companies and supplements the known macroeconomic facts about the current economic crisis with micro data. While a decline in demand was the main challenge companies faced, they also had to cope with financing problems...

Satellite radio competitors XM and Sirius recently announced their intention to merge their companies in a $13 billion deal. Recent financial statements show this merger is necessary. Although both stocks grew steadily through October of 2004, they hit a plateau after that and then began a...

When the seller of an asset grants a right-of-first-refusal to a buyer, this special buyer has the opportunity to purchase the asset at the best price the seller can obtain from the other potential buyers. We show that the right-of-first-refusal is inefficient, and it benefits the special buyer...

Using bank-level data, Claessens and Laeven apply the Panzar and Rosse (1987) methodology to estimate the extent to which changes in input prices are reflected in revenues earned by specific banks in 50 countries' banking systems. They then relate this competitiveness measure to indicators of...

One common reason that firms do not update costing systems to improve cost information is the tradeoff deficit between benefits and implementation costs of such an updated system. This may be true in many cases; but there are situations in that more accurate product costs result in lower profit...

This paper utilizes the quantile regression approach to shed new light on whether differences in the institutional quality across countries matters to the determinants of banking competition. To this end, structural measures of the degree of banking competition for 61 countries during the period...