Banque de France

ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of global food price shocks in driving inflation dynamics, with a particular focus on non‐linear effects and heterogeneity across countries. Using a Bayesian Vector Autoregression (BVAR) approach, we identify global food price shocks and assess their impact on inflation. Quantile regressions reveal that inflation's sensitivity to food price shocks is significantly higher in high‐inflation regimes, with elasticity estimates being significantly larger for higher percentiles compared to the median. Additionally, panel estimations indicate that this sensitivity is particularly pronounced in emerging economies and developing countries, where food constitutes a larger share of household consumption. Our findings contribute to the literature on global inflation synchronisation and highlight the importance of accounting for inflation regimes when analysing the transmission of food commodity price shocks.

Summary Extreme climatic events impose considerable stress on organisms with consequences for key ecological interactions such as pollination. Because temperature directly affects metabolic processes, heat variations may also importantly influence the nutritional needs and feeding choices of animals. Here, we studied the effects of thermal stress on the nutritional choices and performances of bumblebees, using a 3D nutritional geometry design. At optimal temperature for colony development (30°C), bees successfully balanced carbohydrate, protein, and lipid collection, at levels beneficial for body weight and survival. Under cold stress (20°C), bees reduced their overall nutrient collection while selecting proportionally more carbohydrates, thereby prioritizing survival over weight gain. Under heat stress (35°C), nutrient balancing was disrupted and survival dropped. Notably however, across all temperatures, bees maintained stable lipid collection while flexibly adjusting the amount of carbohydrates and proteins, suggesting strong constraints on lipid regulation. Given the pivotal role of bees for pollination, identifying how their nutritional needs change in response to climatic conditions is of prior importance for food safety and the conservation of terrestrial ecosystems.

This paper analyses the impact of “green regulations” - i.e. those aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change and environmental externalities - on innovation, using a novel regulatory database covering the period 008-2022 for Spain. The database identifies regulations at both the national and regional levels through textual analysis. Employing a panel data approach, we assess how different types of environmental regulations - particularly those related to renewable energy - affect firm-level innovation activities. Our findings indicate that national-level green regulations have a positive effect on innovation, whereas regional-level regulations show mixed or negligible impacts. Importantly, the interaction between national and regional regulations, measuring the simultaneous production of legal texts at both levels, can foster innovation but at a reduced pace with respect to the sole production of regulation at the national level. Given the results for regional-level regulation, our findings provide evidence in favour of the hypothesis that regulatory fragmentation due to unequal, overlapping, inconsistent or conflicting procedure across jurisdictions may diminish these benefits.

We study the cost of funding channel by investigating how an easing in firms’ external financing cost affects corporate investment. This paper employs ECB’s corporate security purchase program as a quasi-natural experiment that reduces firms’ bond funding costs. Using balance sheet information on non-financial firms in France, we find that firms increase maintenance investment to preserve existing assets, instead of investing in new equipment to grow in scale. Our findings suggest that firms face non-convex costs in adjusting their capital stock and do not smoothly adjust investment following a shock in the cost of capital.

Using a unique dataset that combines daily employment spell information with firm-level accounting data from Denmark, we explore workers' progression up firm wage and productivity ladders. We find that: (1) Total Factor Productivity (TFP) emerges as a more effective indicator of the job ladder than the average wage paid, with more workers experiencing employer-to-employer transitions from lower to upper tiers of the productivity ladder compared to the wage ladder. (2) Recessions have a cleansing effect when using the productivity job ladder: Lower productivity firms experience a steeper decline in employment growth compared to their higher-tier counterparts. In contrast, due to decreased poaching, high wage firms exhibit greater employment reductions, leading to a sullying effect when using the wage job ladder. High productivity firms also experience greater employment cyclicality due to decreased poaching during recessions. However, firms at the lower end of the productivity spectrum face a more pronounced employment reduction during recessions as they intensify layoffs and reduce hiring from the unemployment pool. (3) Indirect productivity measures, such as sales per worker, can hide or even reverse the cleansing effect of recessions.