Household indebtedness has risen sharply in recent years, with large increases in both secured and unsecured borrowing. In this paper, waves 5 and 10 of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for 1995 and 2000 are used to examine the determinants of participation in the unsecured debt market...

This paper studies the public sector wage gap in Spain by gender, skill level and type of contract, using recent administrative data from tax records. We estimate wage distributions in the presence of covariates separately for men and women in the public and in the private sectors, and we take...

In this paper we study the retirement patterns of couples in a multi-country setting using data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe. In particular, we test whether women’s (men’s) transitions out of the labor force are causally related to the actual realization of their...

Brief summaries and user instruction are presented for the programs TRAMO ("Time Series regression with ARIMA Noise, Missing Observations and Outlers") and SEATS ("Signal Extraction in ARIMA Time Series").

One of the most extended empirical stylized facts about output dynamics in the United States is the positive autocorrelation of output growth. This paper shows that the positive autocorrelation can be better captured by shifts between business cycle states rather than by the standard view of...

The present document details, step by step, an efficient and simple way to construct the file input for the programs TRAMO ("Time Series Regression with ARIMA Noise Missing Observations, and Outliers") and SEATS ("Signal Extraction in ARIMA Time Series") for all possible cases and applications....

The paper deals with the statistical treatment of macroeconomic data for short-run economic analysis, monitoring and control. The main applications are short-term forecasting and unobserved components estimation, including trend and cycle estimation, and, most often, seasonal adjustment. The...

In this article, a unified approach to automatic modeling for univariate series is presented. First, ARIMA models and the classical methods for fitting these models to a given time series are reviewed. Second, some objective methods for model identification are considered and some algorithmical...

We propose a comprehensive methodology to characterize the business cycle comovements across European economies and some industrialized countries, always trying to leave the data speak. Out of this framework, we propose a novel method to show that there is no an Euro economy that acts as an...

The paper contains some implications for applied econometric research. Two important ones are, first, that invertible models, such as AR or VAR models, cannot in general be used to model seasonally adjusted or detrended data. The second one is that to look at the business cycle in detrended...