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Editorial DirectorJan Smets, Member of the Board of Directors of the National Bank of Belgium
Statement of purpose:The purpose of these working papers is to promote the circulation of research results (Research Series) and analytical studies (Documents Series) made within the National Bank of Belgium or presented by external economists in seminars, conferences and conventions organised by the Bank. The aim is therefore to provide a platform for discussion. The opinions expressed are strictly those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bank of Belgium.
AbstractThis study investigates the pricing behaviour of firms in the euro area on the basis of surveys conducted by nine Eurosystem national central banks. Overall, more than 11,000 firms participated in the survey. The results are very robust across countries. Firms operate in monopolistically competitive markets, where prices are mostly set following mark-up rules and where price discrimination is a common practice. Our evidence suggests that both time-and state-dependent pricing strategies are applied by firms in the euro area: around one-third of the companies follow mainly time-dependent pricing rules while two-thirds use pricing rules with some element of statedependence. Although the majority of firms take into account a wide range of information, including past and expected economic developments, about one-third adopts a purely backward-looking behaviour. The pattern of results lends support to the recent wave of estimations of hybrid versions of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve. Price stickiness arises both at the stage when firms review their prices and again when they actually change prices. The most relevant factors underlying price rigidity are customer relationships -as expressed in the theories about explicit and implicit contracts -and thus, are mainly found at the price changing (second) stage of the price adjustment process. Finally, we provide evidence that firms adjust prices asymmetrically in response to shocks, depending on the direction of the adjustment and the source of the shock: while cost shocks have a greater impact when prices have to be raised than when they have to be reduced, reductions in demand are more likely to induce a price change than increases in demand.
We study the evolution of price level dispersion in Europe by combining time-series information on harmonized indices of consumer prices (HICPs) with occasional observations of absolute price levels. We find that European price levels converged over much of the last 40 to 50 years. In the United States, our benchmark, price level dispersion is more or less stable. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that indirect tax rate harmonization, convergence of nontraded input costs, and convergence of traded input costs (in the form of exchange rate stability and increased openness) are all important in explaining European price level convergence. Copyright (c) 2009 The Ohio State University.
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