Policy discussions on the recent financial crisis feature widespread calls to address the pro-cyclical effects of regulation. The main concern is that the new risk-sensitive bank capital regulation (Basel II) may amplify business cycle fluctuations. This paper compares the leading alternative...

This paper tests the opportunity-cost theory using a panel of Spanish firms during the period 1991-2010. Under this theory, productivity-enhancing activities, such as R&D investment, should increase during downturns because of the fall in their relative cost – in terms of forgone output. This...

This article analyses changes in the occupational employment share in Spain for the period 1997-2012 and the way particular sociodemographics adapt to those changes. There seems to be clear evidence of employment polarisation between 1997 and 2012, which accelerates over the recession. Changes...

We broaden the conceptual framework of estimating markups at the sectoral level developed by Roeger (1995), and extended by Crépon et al. (2005) with labour market imperfections, to account for firm-level heterogeneity derived from differences in productivity. We estimate this model with a...

We estimate real wage cyclicality in the period between 1987 and 2013 using a large administrative dataset of workers in Spain. Real wages are weakly procyclical in Spain and, focusing on different phases of the business cycle, we find significant differences between expansions and recessions,...

This paper provides an accurate chronology of the Spanish reference business cycle by adapting the multiple change-point model proposed by Camacho, Gadea and Gómez Loscos (2021). In that approach, each individual pair of specific peaks and troughs from a set of indicators is viewed as a...

Using a dataset that merges information of loan applications from the Spanish CCR with firms' financial accounts, we find that during the great recession access to credit of firms with weak balance sheets deteriorated relative to other firms. However, contrary to the financial accelerator...

What are the output responses to fiscal policy? Despite important advances reported in the literature, quantifying the size of the fiscal multiplier remains a challenge. Indeed, the quest to estimate a unique fiscal multiplier is probably an ill-posed one. The magnitude of the multiplier may...

While Spain has traditionally underperformed its European peers in terms of labor productivity, the trend reverses after 2007. The evolution of aggregate productivity in Spain during the Great Recession is shaped largely, albeit not exclusively, by the adverse conditions in the labor market....