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 estimates the response of consumer prices to a monetary policy shock in Switzerland. We find that there is no evidence of a price puzzle at the aggregate level. This is because our factor-augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) avoids misspecification by including more information...

In this paper we follow the recent empirical literature that has specified reduced-form models for price setting that are closely tied to (S, s)-pricing rules. Our contribution to the literature is twofold. First, we propose an estimator that relaxes distributional assumptions on the unobserved...

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...

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...