This paper investigates price-setting behaviour of firms based on the individual price quotes underlying the Swiss consumer price index. The data set covers the years from 1993 to 2005. Six main findings emerge from the analysis. (i) Prices are sticky; the median duration amounts to 4.6...

While price-setting models usually suggest constant or increasing hazard functions for price changes, empirical studies often find decreasing hazards, possibly due to misspecified or neglected heterogeneity. This paper attempts to disentangle the downward bias into various sources: observed and...

The authors use data from more than 6,000 World Bank projects evaluated between 1983 and 2009 to investigate macro and micro correlates of project outcomes. They find that country-level"macro"measures of the quality of policies and institutions are very strongly correlated with project outcomes,...

Per capita incomes and the quality of governance are strongly positively correlated across countries. We propose an empirical strategy that allows us to separate this correlation into: i) a strong positive causal effect running from better governance to higher per capita incomes, and ii) a weak...

This paper disentangles fluctuations in disaggregate prices into macroeconomic and idiosyncratic components using a factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) in order to shed light on sectoral inflation dynamics in Switzerland. We find that disaggregated prices react only slowly to monetary...

This paper summarizes the methodology of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project, and related analytical issues. The WGI cover over 200 countries and territories, measuring six dimensions of governance starting in 1996: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of...

The analysis of firm-level data collected through parallel international enterprise surveys can reveal important linkages between governance constraints and business growth and investment. The World Business Environment Survey (WBES), an initiative led by the World Bank Group in 1999 and 2000,...

This paper derives stylised facts on sectoral inflation dynamics and confronts these facts with two popular theoretical models of price setting. Based on sectoral price responses to macroeconomic shocks estimated from an approximate factor model, we find that the frequency of price changes...