Search Results
Journal Article
The Basel Accord and Financial Intermediation: The Impact of Policy
This article studies loan activity in a context where banks have to follow Basel Accord?type rules and find financing with the households.
Working Paper
What determines European real exchange rates?
We study a newly constructed panel data set of relative prices of a large number of consumer goods among 31 European countries. We find that there is a substantial and nondiminishing deviation from PPP at all levels of aggregation, even among euro zone members. However, real exchange rates are very closely tied to relative GDP per capita within Europe, both across countries and over time. This relationship is highly robust at all levels of aggregation. We construct a simple two-sector endowment economy model of real exchange rate determination. Simulating the model using the historical ...
Working Paper
Real exchange rates and sectoral productivity in the Eurozone
We investigate the link between real exchange rates and sectoral total factor productivity measures for countries in the Eurozone. Real exchange rate patterns closely accord with an amended Balassa-Samuelson interpretation, both in cross-section and time series. We construct a sticky price dynamic general equilibrium model to generate a cross-section and time series of real exchange rates that can be directly compared to the data. Under the assumption of a common currency, estimates from simulated regressions are very similar to the empirical estimates for the Eurozone. Our findings contrast ...
Working Paper
Price setting in a leading Swiss online supermarket
We study a newly released data set of scanner prices for food products in a large Swiss online supermarket. We find that average prices change about every two months, but when we exclude temporary sales, prices are extremely sticky, changing on average once every three years. Non-sale price behavior is broadly consistent with menu cost models of sticky prices. When we focus specifically on the behavior of sale prices, however, we find that the characteristics of price adjustment seems to be substantially at odds with standard theory.
Working Paper
Basel Accord and financial intermediation: the impact of policy
This paper studies loan activity in a context where banks must follow Basel Accord-type rules and acquire financing from households. Loan activity typically decreases when entrepreneurs? investment returns decline, and we study which type of policy could revigorate an economy in a trough. We find that active monetary policy increases loan volume even when the economy is in good shape; introducing active capital requirement policy can be effective as well if it implies tightening of regulation in bad times. This is performed with an heterogeneous agent economy with occupational choice, ...