Price Setting in the Euro Area: Some Stylized Facts from Individual Producer Price Data

This paper summarizes the microevidence on the setting of producer prices in the euro area. The main findings are: (i) 21% of producer prices are adjusted each month, (ii) producer prices are changed more frequently and by smaller amounts than consumer prices (even after controlling for product characteristics), (iii) price decreases are relatively frequent, (iv) inflation correlates positively with the difference between the frequency of price increases and decreases, and (v) there is substantial variation in price flexibility across sectors, which can be explained in part by differences in the cost structure, the degree of competition, and the level of sectoral inflation.     

CROSS‐HEDGING OF EXCHANGE RATE RISKS: A NOTE*

This note studies the optimal production and hedging decisions of a competitive international firm that exports to two foreign countries. The firm faces multiple sources of exchange rate uncertainty. Cross‐hedging is plausible in that one of the two foreign countries has a currency forward market. We show that the firm's optimal forward position is an over‐hedge, a full‐hedge or an under‐hedge, depending on whether the two random exchange rates are strongly positively correlated, uncorrelated or negatively correlated, respectively.     

CAN INVESTMENT IN INTANGIBLES EXPLAIN THE SWEDISH PRODUCTIVITY BOOM IN THE 1990s?

In the early 1990s the Swedish economy experienced a severe economic and financial crisis which resulted in a substantial GDP decrease. Even though the crisis was not a complete surprise for many economists, almost no one expected that the Swedish economy would be prospering with booming productivity growth only a few years later. Economists have presented three explanations for the fast recovery and productivity growth in 1995–2006: market reforms, crisis recovery, and the impact of ICT. This paper offers an alternative view, emphasizing instead firms' substantial investment in intangible assets such as R&D, design, and advertising. Based on the growth accounting framework, intangible capital accounted for more than 30 percent of the labor productivity growth in the Swedish business sector from 1995 to 2006. Thus, Swedish TFP growth, one of the highest among OECD countries, is reduced substantially when investment in intangibles is included in the growth accounting analysis.     

Bank Finance versus Bond Finance

We present a model with agency costs where heterogeneous firms raise finance through either bank loans or corporate bonds and where banks are more efficient than the market in resolving informational problems. We document some major long‐run differences in corporate finance between the United States and the euro area, and show that our model can explain those differences based on information availability. The model fits the data best when the euro area is characterized by lower availability of public information about corporate credit risk relative to the United States, and when European firms value more than United States firms banks’ flexibility and information acquisition role.     

Corporate Debt Structure and the Financial Crisis

We present a DSGE model where firms optimally choose among alternative instruments of external finance. The model is used to explain the evolving composition of corporate debt during the financial crisis of 2008–09, namely, the observed shift from bank finance to bond finance, at a time when the cost of market debt rose above the cost of bank loans. We show that the flexibility offered by banks on the terms of their loans and firms' ability to substitute among alternative instruments of debt finance are important to shield the economy from adverse real effects of a financial crisis.     

The Impact of Large Portfolio Insurers on Asset Prices

We develop a simple model in which the presence of portfolio insurers in a market of risk-averse traders leads to multiple equilibria for the pricing of financial assets and can cause an increase in volatility, including insurance-induced price drops. We demonstrate, however, that centralized portfolio insurance firms may actually reduce, not increase, volatility, even if the existence of these firms increases the total amount of funds under insurance.