The evolution of Regional and Local governments' spending in Spain is currently under close scrutiny by national and international investors and analysts, international organizations and rating agencies. Indeed, some 50% of general government spending and some 70% of public employment are...

We extend previous work that combines the Value at Risk approach with estimation of the correlation pattern of the macroeconomic determinants of public debt dynamics by means of Vector Auto Regressions (VARs). These estimated models are used to compute the probability that the public debt ratio...

we analyse the impact of fiscal policy shocks in the euro area as a whole, using a newly available quarterly dataset of fiscal variables for the period 1981-2007. to allow for comparability with previous results on euro area countries and the us, we use a standard structural var framework, and...

This paper estimates the GDP impact of legislated tax changes in Spain using a newly constructed narrative record for the period 1986-2015. Our baseline estimates suggest that a 1% of GDP increase in exogenous taxes depresses output by around 1.3% after one year, this negative effect fading away...

The focus of this paper is on nowcasting and forecasting quarterly private consumption. The selection of real-time, monthly indicators focuses on standard (“hard”/“soft” indicators) and less-standard variables. Among the latter group we analyze: i) proxy indicators of economic and policy...

We construct a new Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) index for Spain, building on the influential methodology of Baker, Bloom and Davis (2016), and compare it with the EPU for Spain that these authors provide. We refine the index in several dimensions: we expand the headline newspaper coverage...

We provide additional evidence on the relationship between uncertainty and economic activity. For this purpose, we gather and construct a wide range of proxy indicators of economic and economic policy uncertainty from Spain. We distinguish between the relative merits of different types of...

Public investment in advanced economies is at historical lows, and shows a declining trend since at least the 1980s. Two main hypotheses have been posed to rationalize this fact. On the one hand, the “social dominance hypothesis” claims that this is related to structural factors, given the...

This paper proposes an empirical framework that distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary compliance with fiscal deficit targets on the basis of economic, institutional and political factors. The framework is applied to Spain's Autonomous Communities (regions) over the period 2002-2015....

We uncover the short- and long-run structural determinants of the existing cross-country heterogeneity in public-private pay differentials for a broad set of OECD countries. We explore micro data (EU-SILC, 2004-2012) and macro data (1970-2014). Three results stand out. First, when looking at pay...