It is often argued that the baseline New-Keynesian model, which relies solely on the notion of infrequent price adjustment, cannot account for the observed degree of inflation sluggishness. Therefore it is a common practice among macro modellers to introduce an ad hoc additional source of...

This paper uses a frequency domain approach to gain insight into the correlation between survey indicators and year-on-year GDP growth. Using the Baxter-King filter, we split up each series into three components: a short-term, a business cycle (oscillations between 18 and 96 months) and a...

One of the most important predictions made in recent international trade literature based on heterogeneous firms concerns the within-industry job reallocation from firms not involved in international markets to those that are. This paper quantifies the extent of this reallocation using a dataset...

This paper evaluates the extent of downward nominal and real wage rigidity for different categories of workers and firms using the methodology recently developed by the International Wage Flexibility Project (Dickens and Goette, 2006). The analysis is based on an administrative data set on...

The aim of this study is to give an overview of recent developments in Belgium's direct investment relations with the rest of the world. The analysis is based mainly on two sets of statistics drawn up by the National Bank of Belgium, namely, data on direct investment flows from the balance of...

Temporal distribution of individual price changes is of crucial importance for business cycle theory and for the micro-foundations of price adjustment. While it is routinely assumed that price changes are staggered over time, both theory and evidence are ambiguous. We use a large Belgian data...

This paper explores a newly-available panel data set merging balance sheet and international trade transaction data for Belgium. Both imports and exports appear to be highly concentrated among few firms and seem to have become more so over time. Focusing on manufacturing, we find that facts...

Keynesian economics dominated economic thought and macroeconomic policy-making in the 1950s and 1960s. However, the diffusion of Keynesian economics has been uneven. In this paper, we compare the spread of Keynesian economics in two continental European countries: Belgium and Italy. We focus on...

This paper documents producer price setting in 6 countries of the euro area: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and Portugal. It collects evidence from available studies on each of those countries and also provides new evidence. These studies use monthly producer price data. The following...

The economic impact of the port sector is usually measured at an aggregate level by indicators such as value added, employment and investment. This paper tries to define the economic relevance for the regional as well as for the national economy at a disaggregate level. It attempts to identify,...