How much should be spent in research and development (R&D)? How should R&D vary over the business cycle? In this paper we answer both questions in the context of a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium model with Schumpeterian endogenous growth. Firstly, we demonstrate that, although the...

We analyze the evolution of General Government employment in Spain over the economic crisis and the recent fiscal consolidation process. We characterize the changes in the structure and composition of General government workforce between economics sectors, level of administration, and type of...

Fiscal decentralisation has been one of the key features of developments in the Spanish public sector in recent decades. There has been a gradual shift of responsibilities for the management of certain services form the State to the regional governments along with development of the arrangements...

Given that savings and productivity follow a hump shaped profile with respect to age and given that demographic profiles vary across countries, population age structure may be linked to differences in levels of economic development. In this paper we measure the importance of age structure in...

This study reviews, from both a theoretical and empirical perspective, the links between composition and quality of public finances, on the one hand, and long-term economic growth, on the other, focusing on the EU-15 countries. Specifically, for a given level of the general government balance,...

We develop the barebones of a highly stylized theoretical endogenous growth model for analyzing the impact of R&D investment on long run growth. We use this framework to identify a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model on GDP growth, inflation and R&D investment, along with the...

This paper estimates the response of per capita GDP growth to changes in the proportion of mature workers across countries. We define and estimate the effect of demographic maturity in two ways. First, a growing cohort of working age persons (15-64) is found to have a large positive effect on...

Inflation has fallen dramatically in countries like Spain and Italy over the last decade, but the rate of increase in "home good" prices remains stubbornly higher than the rate of increase in "traded good" prices. The paper begins by showing that this discrepancy can be explained (at least in...

This paper considers panel growth regressions in the presence of model uncertainty and reverse causality concerns. For this purpose, my econometric framework combines Bayesian Model Averaging with a suitable likelihood function for dynamic panel models with weakly exogenous regressors and fixed...