This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

This paper presents a simple model of state-dependent pricing that allows identifying the relative importance of both nominal and real factors in price rigidity. Using two rich datasets consisting of a large fraction of the price quotes used to compute the Belgian and French Consumer Price...