Both the Fed's defenders and critics focus on macroeconomic questions. What is the correct monetary policy? Does the economy need an “activist” Fed? Should the central bank intervene to reduce unemployment, or focus on keeping prices stable? Should the Fed target interest rates or nominal...

Aggregated output in industrialized countries has become less volatile over the pastdecades. Whether this “Great Moderation” can be found in firm level data as wellremains disputed. We study the evolution of firm level output volatility using abalanced panel dataset on German firms that...

Structural vector-autoregressive models are potentially very useful tools for guiding both macro- and microeconomic policy. In this paper, we present a recently developed method for exploiting non-Gaussianity in the data for estimating such models, with the aim of capturing the causal structure...

This introductory essay briefly summarizes the eleven empirical studies of price setting and price adjustment that are included in this special issue. The studies, which use data from several European countries, were conducted as part of the European Central Bank's Inflation Persistence Network.

This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on firms' investment behaviour. The analysis relies on a comprehensive database of Belgian firms covering all sectors of economic activity and firms of all sizes. We proceed in two steps. First, we estimate a reduced-form investment equation...

In this paper we derive a microfounded macro New Keynesian model for open economies, be them large or small. We consider habit formation in consumption, sectoral linkages, domestic and foreign governments, tradable and non-tradable final and intermediate goods and imperfect pass-through in these...

We estimate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms’ investment decisions from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms’ subjective qualitative expectations. They are close to their theoretical counterparts, the variances of future demand and...

This paper analyses euro area non-financial corporations (NFC) money demand, both from a macro and a microeconomic point of view. At a macro level, money holdings are modelled as a function of real gross added value, the price level, the long-term interest rate on bank lending to non-financial...

In this paper we analyse household holdings of the broad monetary aggregate M3 in the euro area from 1991 until 2009. We develop four models, two in nominal, two in real terms, with satisfactory economic and statistical properties. The main determinants are a transactions variable, wealth...

Survey results in 15 European countries for almost 15,000 firms reveal that Belgian firms react more than the average European firm to adverse shocks by reducing permanent and temporary employment. On the basis of a firm-level analysis, this paper confirms that the different reaction to shocks...