Data for: Average-cost pricing: Some evidence and implications

Abstract of associated article: We present new survey evidence on pricing behavior for more than 14,000 European firms, and study its macroeconomic implications. Among firms that are price setters, roughly 75% respond that their prices are set as a markup on total costs, a business practice termed “full cost pricing”. Only 25% set prices as markups over variable or marginal costs. Moreover, using industry data for the U.S., we find that the correlation between changes in output prices and changes in variable input prices is significantly lower when fixed costs are likely to be more important.Since our results are similar to the findings in the classic and controversial paper of Hall and Hitch (1939) and subsequent survey evidence, we believe it worth studying the implications of full cost pricing for macroeconomics. We first propose a problem for the firm where full cost pricing can arise as optimizing behavior. We embed this problem, featuring an occasionally binding constraint, into a simple general equilibrium model. We show that when the model is hit by a shock that makes the constraint binding, the response of endogenous variables is amplified significantly more than it would be under the unconstrained regime.

本文摘要：本研究提出了关于超过14,000家欧洲企业定价行为的最新调查证据，并探讨了其宏观经济影响。在价格制定者中，大约75%的企业表示其定价是以总成本为基数加价的，这一商业行为被称为“完全成本定价”。仅有25%的企业将价格定位于变动成本或边际成本之上。此外，利用美国行业数据，我们发现当固定成本可能更为重要时，产出价格变动与变动输入价格变动之间的相关性显著降低。鉴于我们的研究结果与霍尔和希奇（1939年）的经典且颇具争议的论文以及后续的调查证据相似，我们认为研究完全成本定价对宏观经济的影响是值得的。我们首先提出一个问题，即完全成本定价可能作为优化行为出现的企业问题。我们将这一问题，其中包含偶尔具有约束力的限制条件，嵌入到一个简单的一般均衡模型中。我们表明，当模型受到使约束条件生效的冲击时，内生变量的反应相较于无约束状态下将显著增强。