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.关联论文摘要：本研究基于覆盖14000余家欧洲企业的全新调研数据，分析企业定价行为及其宏观经济影响。在具备定价自主权的企业中，约75%的企业表示其定价基于总成本的成本加成，该商业实践被称为完全成本定价法（full cost pricing）；仅有25%的企业采用可变成本或边际成本的成本加成定价模式。此外，借助美国行业层面数据，研究团队发现，当固定成本的影响更为显著时，产出价格变动与可变投入品价格变动之间的相关性显著更低。鉴于本研究结果与霍尔与希奇（Hall and Hitch, 1939）颇具争议的经典论文及后续相关调研证据高度契合，我们认为有必要深入探讨完全成本定价法对宏观经济学的研究价值。本研究首先构建企业决策模型，证明完全成本定价法可作为企业最优决策行为的内生结果；随后将该包含偶发性绑定约束的决策模型嵌入简化的一般均衡模型（general equilibrium model）框架中。研究表明，当模型遭遇冲击导致约束绑定生效时，内生变量的响应幅度将显著高于无约束基准情形下的响应水平。