Due to their early release, Business Tendency Surveys (BTS) are widely used in short term forecasting. Their questions are mainly qualitative; answers are most often used to calculate balances of opinions, which are defined as the difference between the proportions of positive answers with...

Business tendency surveys (BTS) carried out by the statistical institute INSEE are intensively used for the short-term forecasting of the French economic activity. In particular, the service BTS has been used together with the industry BTS for the short-term forecasting of GDP growth since...

In France, the business tendency surveys conducted in all the important sectors of the economy are key components in diagnosing the economic outlook. Over the years, INSEE has gradually introduced business climate indicators for each business sector. Such indicators summarise the data contained...

Do tariffs inhibit trade flows by limiting the entry of exporting firms (extensive margin') or by restricting the average volume exported by each firm (intensive margin')? Using a gravity equation approach, we analyze how the decrease in tariffs promoted during the 1990s by the Uruguay Round...

The two oil shocks of the 1970s reduced the GDP growth rate. Since that period, sudden oil price increases have been considered as a major source of economic slowdown. We estimate VAR models and Markov-Switching models to evaluate the impact of oil price increases on French growth. Our results...

Job flows (job creations and job destructions) and worker flows (hires and quits) are central to recent analysis of labor market. The scale of gross job flows (creations + destructions) compared to net job flows (creations - destructions) has a part in the renewal of Schumpeterian analysis. It...

This paper is an empirical study of the effect of shocks to firms' collateral, with a focus on land holdings. We find evidence that stand-alone French firms are credit constrained. They invest up to .39¬ more per extra euro of collateral, and they finance this additional investment by issuing...

Economists have paid very little attention to the role of working conditions in sickness absence. Yet, bad working conditions are a potential determinant of labour supply, either directly or through their impact on health. This study tries to shed some light on this issue. To begin with, we...

In spite of prevalent views among economists and business management experts in favour of corporate focus development strategies still lack empirical evidence. The concepts of diversification and product refocusing of firms businesses are difficult to express with quantitative indicators, as the...

As schumpeterian creative destruction is increasingly popular, this leads to focus on high-growth firms. These firms have been called gazelles by Birch. Among the SME employing 20 to 250 workers in 1993 and still alive in 2003, the top 5% of the distribution of growth - henceforth called...