Over the last decade house prices increased remarkably in many countries. However, while in several countries there was an employment boom in the construction sector, in others the share of employment in this sector did not significantly change. In this paper we estimate a model of labor demand...

We study the impact of (widespread) downward wage rigidity on the fl ows from employment to non-employment at the onset of the Great Recession. Downward wage (growth) rigidity is due to the fact that sector-level collective agreements in Spain are automatically extended to all fi rms, setting...

The purpose of the present paper is twofold. First, we characterize de Fed's systematic response to technology shocks and its implications for US output, hours and inflation. Second we evaluate the extent to which that responses can be accounted for by a simple monetary policy rule in the...

Since the 1980s, important and progressive reforms have profoundly reshaped the structure of the Chinese banking system. Many empirical studies suggest that financial reform promoted bank competition in most mature and emerging economies. However, some earlier studies that adopted conventional...

This paper is the first that applies a new measure of competition, the Boone indicator, to the banking industry. This approach is able to measure competition of bank market segments, such as the loan market, whereas many well-known measures of competition can consider the entire banking market...

The growth in the interest rates paid on Spanish public debt since 2008 and the impairment of the interbank market have generated concerns about their effects on competition for bank deposits in Spain. I combine a nested logit model of bank deposit supply with a structural model of competition...

Many studies have established that a small number of firms, known as fast-growth firms or Gazelles, create most of the new jobs. In spite of the importance of this topic from a policy-point of view, most of those studies are descriptive and limited to a comparison of the characteristics of the...

This paper analyses the impact that firms' financial position has on investment decisions using panel data from a large sample of non-financial corporations (around 120,000 firms) in six euro area countries (Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain). The results indicate that...

This paper studies the labour demand using a Q model in which labour and capital entail adjustment costs. The estimates are based on an unbalanced panel of Spanish firms over the period 1989-96. The corresponding Q variable for labour is significant in explaining hiring rates. Its estimated...

This paper shows that liquidity constraints restrict job creation even when labor markets are flexible. In a dynamic model of labor demand, I show that in an environment of imperfect capital and imperfect labor markets, firms use temporary contracts to relax financial constraints. Evidence for...