Suchergebnisse

The ECB objective is set in terms of year on year growth rate of the Euro area HICP. Nonetheless, a good deal of attention is given to national data by market analysts when they try to anticipate monetary policy moves. In this paper we use the Generalized Dynamic Factor model to develop a set of core inflation indicators that, combining national data with area wide information, allow us to answer two related questions. The first is whether country specific data actually bear any relevance for the future path of area wide price growth, over and above that already contained in area wide data. The second is whether in order to track ECB monetary policy decisions it is useful to take into account national information and not only area wide statistics. In both cases our findings point to the conclusion that, once area wide information is properly taken into account, there is little to be gained from considering national idiosyncratic developments.

This chapter asks if and why advanced countries differ in their ability to export to China and India. To this end we exploit a newly collected, comparable cross-country dataset (EFIGE) obtained from a survey of 15,000 manufacturing firms in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. The EFIGE dataset contains detailed information on firms' international activities as well as firm characteristics such as size and productivity, governance and management structure, workforce, innovation and research activity. We study both the extensive and intensive margins of exports and identify firm characteristics that are positively or negatively correlated wiThexporting activity tout court and wiThexporting to China and India conditional on being an exporter. We confirm previous rich evidence and show that larger, more productive, and more innovative firms are more likely to become exporters and export more. We also provide some new evidence on the role of governance and management: while there does not seem to be a strong negative effect of family ownership, we find that a higher percentage of family management reduces a firm's export propensity and export volumes. When we turn to exports to China and India, we find that firms exporting there must be on average larger, more productive, and more innovative than firms exporting elsewhere.