In this paper we analyze the role of replacement and innovation activity in shaping investment behavior and labor productivity in a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms from 1990 to 2001. Investment is concentrated about large investment episodes, or investment spikes, whose nature varies by...

We provide empirical evidence on the effects of tax liability changes in the United States. We make a distinction between “surprise” and “anticipated” tax shocks. Surprise tax cuts give rise to a large boom in the economy. Anticipated tax liability tax cuts are instead associated with a...

The aim of this paper is to contribute to explaining differences in aggregate productivity between similar, industrialized countries such as the US and European Union (EU) member states. By introducing shifts in administrative entry cost and a firm technology adoption decision in a model of...

A continuous monitoring of the evolution of the economy is fundamental for the decisions of public and private decision makers. This paper proposes a new monthly indicator of the euro area real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with several original features. First, it considers both the output side...

There is a wide literature on the dynamic adjustment of employment and its relationship with the business cycle. Our aim is to propose a statistical model that offers a congruent representation of post-war US employment and output data. We use a cointegrated vector autoregressive...

In this paper we propose a monthly measure for the euro area Gross Domestic Product (GDP) based on a small scale factor model for mixed frequency data, featuring two factors: the first is driven by hard data, whereas the second captures the contribution of survey variables as coincident...

This paper considers a sticky price model with a cash-in-advance constraint where agents forecast inflation rates by fitting econometric models to data. Agents are uncertain about which model to fit and can choose from a class of models. Only some of the models in this class are consistent with...

This paper constructs a composite index of coincident economic indicators (CEI), which tracks the state of the Spanish economy better than real GDP, and provides a rigorous dating of the Spanish business cycle turning points.

Shocks to investment-specific technology have been identified as a main source of U.S. aggregate output volatility. In this paper we assess the contribution of these shocks to the volatility of labor market variables, namely, unemployment, vacancies, tightness and the job-finding rate. Thus, our...

We highlight the salient characteristics and implications of the seminal contributions in the field of vintage capital growth theory (proposed entry for the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition).