The adoption of court fees has been traditionally justified as a means to improve the performance of enforcement institutions as they may have an effect of deterrence of the dispute. Judicial congestion has clear negative impacts on economic performance. Spain, which has one of the highest rates...

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...

We construct a new newspaper-based sentiment indicator for Spain that allows us to monitor Spanish economic activity in real-time. As opposed to the traditional survey-based confidence indicators that are released at the end of the month, our indicator can be constructed on a daily basis and...

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...

This paper explores the dynamics of price-cost mark-ups using firm-level data, paying particular attention to the crisis period 2008-2011. To this end, we apply the econometric framework developed by Klette (1999) to a comprehensive sample of Spanish non-financial corporations in order to...

We construct Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) indexes for a number of Latin American (LA) economies (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela) and the region as a whole based on the Spanish press. Our measures are comparable across countries. We study the macroeconomic...

Firms are significantly affected by uncertainty about economic activity. Recent literature has shown that uncertainty is a factor of increasing importance in a globalized world, especially after its sharp increase during the last crisis. However, uncertainty did not impact all the firms in the...

In this article, we measure changes over time in the synchronization of housing price cycles across Spanish cities. In doing so, we rely on a regime-switching framework that identifies the housing price cycles of pairs of cities, and simultaneously infers the evolving relation between those...