In this paper we look at fixed-term contracts and examine the main features of temporary as opposed to regular employment, keeping the focus on employment careers and wage dynamics of workers employed under fixed-term contracts. Previous work found that fixed-term contracts serve as screening...

The consequences of aggregation, temporal or spatial, for the estimation of demand models are theoretically well-known, but have not been documented empirically with appropriate data before. In this paper we conduct a simple, but instructive, exercise to fill in this gap, using a large quarterly...

Portuguese firms engage in intense reallocation, most employers simultaneously hire and separate from workers, resulting in high excess worker turnover flows. These flows are constrained by the employment protection gap between open-ended and fixed-term contracts. We explore a reform that...

We explore a new approach for nowcasting the output gap based on singular spectrum analysis. Resorting to real-time vintages, a recursive exercise is conducted so to assess the real-time reliability of our approach for nowcasting the US output gap, in comparison with some well-known benchmark...

This paper quantifies the role of expectation-driven cycles for housing market fluctuations in the United States. We find that news shocks: (1) account for a sizable fraction of the variability in house prices and other macroeconomic variables over the business cycle and (2) significantly...

We take to the data an RBC model with two salient features. First, we allow government consumption to directly affect the marginal utility of consumption. Second, we allow public capital to affect the productivity of private factors. On the one hand, private and government consumption are...

We show how monetary aggregates can be usefully incorporated in forecasts of inflation. This requires fully disregarding the high-frequency fluctuations blurring the money/inflation relation, i.e., the projection of inflation onto monetary aggregates must be restricted to the low frequencies....

This paper develops a new measure of quarterly discretionary tax shocks for Portugal that result from changes in legislation, following the narrative approach. It covers the years from 1996 to 2012 and was based on a comprehensive analysis of tax policy measures taken in the course of this...

We investigate the reaction of output to government spending shocks at the zero lower bound (ZLB) on the nominal interest rate when government and private consumption are non-separable in preferences. In particular, substitutability between private and government consumption significantly...

The assessment of synchronization of macroeconomic fluctuations across countries or regions has been crucial, for example, for the debate on economic integration. In this paper, we propose a multivariate measure of synchronization to assess cohesion across countries or regions by resorting to...