Railways were one of the main engines of the Latin American trade boom before 1914. Railway construction often required financial support from local governments, which depended on their fiscal capacity. But since the main government revenues were trade-related, this generated a two-way feedback...

This study is to our knowledge the first attempt to infer the consequences on productivity entailed by anticompetitive regulations in product and labor markets through their impacts on production prices and wages. Results are encouraging showing that changes in production prices and wages at...

A number of recent papers point to the importance of distinguishing between the price reaction to micro and macro shocks in order to reconcile the volatility of individual prices with the observed persistence of aggregate inflation. We emphasize instead the importance of distinguishing between...

This paper uncovers the response pattern to global shocks of euro area countries' real effective exchange rates before and after the start of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), a largely open ended question when the euro was created. We apply to that end a newly developed methodology based on...

In this paper, we estimate the determinants of the spreads between the 10-year sovereign bond yields and the (interest rate) swap rate for a sample of 22 OECD countries over the January 1999-December 2013 period, using various models. Our main, fixed-effect, model highlights the crucial role of...

Our study aims at assessing the actual importance of the two main channels usually contemplated in the literature through which upstream sector anticompetitive regulations may impact productivity growth: business investments in R&D and in ICT. We thus precisely try to estimate what are the...

The recent crisis has revealed the potentially dramatic consequences of allowing the build-up of an overstretched leverage of the financial system, and prompted proposals by bank supervisors to significantly tighten bank capital requirements as part of the new Basel 3 regulations. Although these...

We estimate an ordered probit model in order to explain the occurrence and magnitude of producer price changes in the French manufacturing sector. We use data consisting essentially of the Banque de France monthly business surveys, pooled over the years 1998-2005. Our results show that changes...

Using a broad dataset of individual consolidated data of French banks over the period 1993-2007, we seek to evaluate the sensitivity to adverse macroeconomic scenarios of the three main sources of banking income, namely interest margins, fees and commissions, and trading income. First, we show...

The paper focuses on the influence of upstream competition for productivity outcomes in downstream sectors. This relation is illustrated with a neo-Schumpeterian theoretical model of innovation (Aghion et al., 1997) with market imperfections in the production of intermediate goods. In this...