In this paper we investigate to what extent firm investment in transition countries is sensitive to internal finance. We use accounts data of over 4000 companies in four countries at different stages of transition. We find that firms in Bulgaria and Romania are less sensitive to internal...

The paper develops a methodological framework for quantifying the impact of merger control regulations. While most countries have different criteria in terms of sales, market shares or combinations of the above, and while listing an inventory of these criteria is easy, such an exercise does not...

Policy-making institutions such as the European Commission, the ECB and the OECD often use unit labor costs as a measure of international competitiveness. The goal of this paper is to examine how well this measure is related to international export performance at the firm level. To this end, we...

Policy-making institutions such as the European Commission, the ECB and the OECD often use unit labor costs as a measure of international competitiveness. The goal of this paper is to examine how well this measure is related to international export performance at the firm level. To this end, we...

We investigate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms' planned and realized investment from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms' own expectations about demand and prices and firm's sales. We find that demand uncertainty at the time of planning...

The article summarises the scientific contributions and discussions at the 2014 conference organised by the NBB on “Total factor productivity : measurement, determinants and impacts”. At this conference, six original contributions were presented and discussed. They addressed the following...

Based on a reduced-form state-dependent pricing model with random thresholds, we specify and estimate a nonlinear panel data model with an unobserved factor representing the common cost or demand components of the unobserved optimal price. Using this model, we are able to assess the relative...

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bank of Belgium. All remaining errors are the authors' responsibility. We thank Holger Görg, Florian Mayneris, Bruno Merlevede, Glenn Rayp, participants of the 2010 National Bank...

This paper evaluates the extent of downward nominal and real wage rigidity for differentcategories of workers and firms using the methodology developed by the International WageFlexibility Project (IWFP). The analysis is based on an administrative data set on individualearnings, covering...

This paper decomposes wage bill changes at the firm level into components due to wage changes, and components due to flows of employment. It relies on an administrative matched employer-employee dataset of individual earnings merged with firms' annual accounts for Belgium over the period...