The Financial Crisis has hit particularly hard countries like Ireland or Spain. Procyclical fiscal policy has contributed to a boom-bust cycle that undermined fiscal positions and deepened current account deficits during ...

The paper investigates whether the growing GDP share of the services sector can contribute to explain the great moderation in the US. We identify and analyze three oil price shocks and use a SVAR analysis to measure their ...

This paper discusses the long run effect of changes in the age distribution of Spanish population on the unemployment rate, disaggregated by sex and age segments in the light of cointegration theory given the non stationarity ...

In this paper we study the effect of population age distribution upon private consumption expenditure in Spain from 1964 to 1997 using aggregate data. We obtain four main results. First, changes in the population pyramid ...

This paper studies if imperfections in the labor market justify a different fiscal policy. We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with a Ramsey planner deciding about public spending, labor taxes and debt. Two ...

This paper analyzes whether a minimum wage can be an optimal redistribution policy when distorting taxes and lump-sum transfers are also available in a competitive economy. We build a static general equilibrium model with ...

This paper characterizes the optimal fiscal policy when it is assumed that there exists a minimum wage below which no worker can be hired. The rigidity due to the minimum wage legislation can lead to equilibria in which ...

In this paper we study the evolution of income inequality for employees and self-employed workers. We highlight the importance of separately analyze these different sources of income to gain a broader understanding of ...

This paper analyzes the business cycle properties of the Hong Kong economy during the 1982-2004 period, which includes the financial crisis experienced in 1997-98. We show that output, output growth rate and real interest ...

This paper uses a new method for describing dynamic comovement and persistence in economic time series which builds on the contemporaneous forecast error method developed in den Haan (2000). This data description method ...