The article analyses recent developments in business investment for a large group of EU countries, using a broad set of analytical tools and data sources. We find that the assessment of whether or not investment is currently low varies across benchmarks and countries. At the euro area level and...

This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks' mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

Productivity growth is slowing down among OECD countries, coupled with increased misallocation of resources. A recent strand of literature focuses on the role of non-viable firms (“zombie firms”) to explain these developments. Using a rich firm-level dataset for one of the OECD countries...

We examine the relationship between lax monetary policy, access to high-yield bond markets and productivity in the US between 2008 and 2016. Using monetary policy surprises, obtained from changes in interest rates futures in narrow windows around FOMC announcements, we isolate the increased...

In this report we review the literature on the relationship between ICT and productivity. In Sect. 1 we discuss in broad terms the theoretical relationship between ICT and productivity, while in Sect. 2 we present the growth accounting methodology, which tries to measure the contributions to...

In this paper we have estimated a behavioural equation for R&D investment. We assess the impact of liquidity constraints and capabilities, measured respectively as internal cash flow and distance from the technological frontier. Our estimation is performed on an industry level panel covering...

The present paper studies the relationship between R&D investment and firm productivity growth by explicitly accounting for non-linearities in the R&D-productivity relationship and inter-sectoral firm heterogeneity. In order to address these issues, we employ a two step estimation approach, and...

The paper investigates how top R&D investors differ in the production impact of their inputs and in their rate of technical change. We use the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard and perform a quantile estimation of an augmented Cobb-Douglass production function for a panel of more than...

This report compares R&D modelling approaches in four macroeconomic models used by the European Commission for ex-ante policy impact assessment: one Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model - QUEST; one Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) model - RHOMOLO; one Computable...

This paper assesses how the adoption of a range of digital technologies affects firm productivity. It combines cross-country firm-level data on productivity and industry-level data on digital technology adoption in an empirical framework that accounts for firm heterogeneity. The results provide...