If SMEs have below average mark-up ratios - gross operating profit over value added - it is because they are less capital intensive - less capital to be remunerated - and not because they are less profitable. On the contrary, their profitability appears higher both in terms of usual accounting...

We explore the patterns of localisation in the French manufacturing and service industries using the distance-based approach developed by Duranton and Overman (2005). The idea of this methodology is to consider the distribution of distances between pairs of plants in an industry and to compare...

Several tools are routinely used to predict or analyze the impact of employment policies: macroeconometric models, small-scale GE models, ex post evaluations based either on macroeconomic time series or on microeconomic data. We present here a new instrument whose methodology is intermediate...

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...