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...

This paper proposes a parsimonious approach to test non-linear dependence on the conditional mean and variance of hedge funds with respect to several market factors. My approach introduces non-linear dependence by means of empirically relevant polynomial functions of the factors. For comparison...

To select the best leading indicators for predicting short-term inflation, an extensive number of economic variables is analysed at quarterly level on the basis of their past correlation with the consumer price index (CPI) and its services and non-energy processed goods component (IPSEBENE)....

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...

The paper deals with seasonal adjustment and trend estimation as a signal extraction problem in a regression-ARIMA model-based framework. This framework includes the capacity to preadjust the series by removing outliers and deterministic effects in general. For the preadjusted series the model...

During the last years, a number of countries have adopted formal inflation targeting (IT) monetary policy frameworks in a context of global inflation moderation. This paper studies inflation dynamics in eight Latin American countries, some of which have adopted formal targets. We analyze...

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...