Central banks

FEDS Paper: Cyclical Fluctuations, Financial Frictions, and Productivity Differences across Firms

Luca Guerrieri, Jinill Kim, and Arsenii MishinWithin narrowly defined industries, the most productive firms produce far more than the least productive from the same inputs, and this dispersion widens in downturns. We build a tractable representative-agent model in which financial frictions—adverse selection and moral hazard—make firms sort endogenously into lenders, strategic defaulters, and producers.

Tracking euro area labour market developments through restructuring announcements

This box examines whether large-scale restructuring announcements recorded in the European Restructuring Monitor (ERM) compiled by Eurofound contain economically meaningful signals of euro area labour market dynamics. We construct a net job changes indicator, demonstrating that its lagged values contain information on episodes of below-average employment performance ahead of official data releases.

The narrowing of the euro area current account balance in 2025

This box examines the narrowing of the euro area current account surplus from 2.7% of GDP in 2024 to 1.7% in 2025. The decline was driven mainly by services trade and income flows and particularly by developments vis-à-vis the United States and China. For the United States, this reflected the role of US multinational enterprises, whose euro area affiliates supported goods exports but generated larger services and income deficits. Imports from China grew, especially in machinery and manufactured goods.

What has kept goods inflation low? The role of the import exposure to China

This box analyses the impact of prices of imports from China on euro area goods inflation. Inflation for China-exposed goods has been persistently lower than total goods inflation, with model-based estimates suggesting that shocks which bring down the prices of imports from China by 10% in exposed sectors reduce inflation by 0.1-0.7 percentage points in key categories such as furniture and appliances.

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