We estimate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms’ investment decisions from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms’ subjective qualitative expectations. They are close to their theoretical counterparts, the variances of future demand and...

The purpose of this paper is to explain the relation between the Border Effect and industrial concentration. This is achieved by founding this relation on the Home Market Effect and testing the robustness of this foundation through an application to the European Single Market. A sectorial...

There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the quality content of Chinese exports and to what extent China imposes a threat to the market positions of advanced economies. While China’s export structure is very similar to that of the advanced world, its export unit values are well below...

Capital quality improvement is a general phenomenon. Therefore quality correction is needed in price indexes. There is substantial evidence of biases in the official price indexes of capital equipment. We apply to euro area statistics estimates of these biases based on US data thus deriving...

We analyze the impact of efficiency on bank risk. We also consider whether bank capital has an effect on this relationship. We model the inter-temporal relationships among efficiency, capital and risk for a large sample of commercial banks operating in the European Union. We find that reductions...

In a cross section of OECD countries we replace the macroeconomic production function by a production possibility frontier, TFP being the composite effect of efficiency scores and possibility frontier changes. We consider, for the periods 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, one output: GDP per worker; three...

This paper examines the degree of price rigidity in Belgian consumer prices, using a large database. As to the observed degree of rigidity, the results reveal a substantial amount of heterogeneity, not only across but also within product categories. While prices turn out to be perfectly flexible...

This paper analyses euro area non-financial corporations (NFC) money demand, both from a macro and a microeconomic point of view. At a macro level, money holdings are modelled as a function of real gross added value, the price level, the long-term interest rate on bank lending to non-financial...

In this paper we analyse household holdings of the broad monetary aggregate M3 in the euro area from 1991 until 2009. We develop four models, two in nominal, two in real terms, with satisfactory economic and statistical properties. The main determinants are a transactions variable, wealth...