More Facts about Prices: France Before and During the Great Recession

Nicoletta Berardi, Erwan Gautier and Hervé Le Bihan

Working papers from Banque de France

Abstract: Using micro price data covering the Great Recession period, we document new facts on price rigidity in France: (i) each month, 17% of prices are changed versus 23% in the United States. When sales are excluded, only 14% of prices are modified in France versus 15% in the United States; (ii) the distribution of price changes is dispersed with a lot of large and very small price changes; (iii) price increases are more frequent in January and September, even after controlling for sales; (iv) price changes related to sales and product replacements are less driven by inflation variations than regular price changes; (v) the monthly inflation rate is correlated to the frequencies of price decreases and increases. The volatility in the sizes of price increases and decreases is mainly due to sales and promotions; (vi) during the Great Recession, the patterns of price adjustment were only slightly modified: the frequency, average size and dispersion of price decreases increased a little.

Keywords: price stickiness; inflation; consumer prices; sales; product substitution. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D40 E31 L11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme, nep-mac and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
Journal Article: More Facts about Prices: France Before and During the Great Recession (2015)
Working Paper: More facts about prices: France before and during the Great Recession (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bfr:banfra:425

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