We investigate the wage-setting behavior of French companies using an ad-hoc survey specifically conducted for this study. Our main results are the following. i) Wages are changed infrequently. 75% of firms change their wages once a year. Wage changes occur at regular intervals during the year and are concentrated in January and July. ii) We find a lower degree of downward real wage rigidity and nominal wage rigidity in France compared to the European average. iii) About one third of companies have an internal policy to grant wage increases according to inflation. iv) When companies are faced with adverse shocks, the latter are partially transmitted into prices. Companies also adopt cost-cutting strategies. The wage of newly hired employees plays an important role in this adjustment.
In this paper, the results of the quantification procedures and the properties of expectations series obtained for two data vintages are compared. The volume index of production sold in manufacturing is defined for end-of-sample and real time data, and evaluated against expectations expressed in business tendency surveys. Empirical analysis shows that (1) there are no statistically significant differences between the quantification results obtained on the basis of real time and end-of-sample data, and (2) the results of unbiasedness and orthogonality tests are not influenced by data vintage. Therefore, for the purposes of analyzing the properties of expectations expressed in the business tendency survey, researchers can use easily available end-of-sample data instead of custom-designed and individually compiled real time databases. Also, (3) expectations series are not unbiased or efficient forecasts of changes in production, regardless of data vintage.
Use of appropriate data vintages and taking data revisions into account have only recently became a staple of applied econometric analysis. In this paper, the topic of data vintage in regression quantification procedures is readdressed for survey data on general economic situation. From empirical analysis it follows that quantification of survey data on general economic situation on the basis of industrial production index does not present a significant improvement over the use of response balance. Additionally, results obtained for real-time and end-of-sample data are very similar and do not suggest superiority of any of these two data vintages as far as quantification of survey data on general economic situation is concerned
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