Housing prices diverge from construction prices after 1997 in four major countries. Besides, total-factor productivity (TFP) differences between construction and the general economy account for the evolution of construction prices in the US and Germany, but not in the UK and Spain.

In a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents, this note shows that beyond a certain low level, financial development is associated with higher relative consumption–income volatility in the presence of a working capital constraint. Informality on the other hand...

Using a novel dataset on 2012 tax inspections by the Hellenic Ministry of Finance in tourist and high economic activity areas in 13 regions in Greece we find significant evidence that the intensification of tax audits can induce tax compliance.

We consider a dual labor market with a frictional formal sector and a competitive informal sector. We show that the size of the informal sector is generally too large compared to the optimal allocation of the workers. It follows that our results give a rationale to informality-reducing policies.

A home production model that explicitly accounts for taxes and public expenditures on day-care and elder-care, substitutes for work households perform at home, is used to evaluate the welfare implications of alternative public expenditure policies. Both subsidy and workfare policies are welfare...

We analyze the formality benefits through productivity-enhancing public goods. We document that: benefits from formality matter for firms’ optimal decisions; there is a disconnect between the objectives of maximizing formality versus welfare; this disconnect is mitigated under higher formality...

The U.S. prewar output series exhibit smaller shock-persistence than postwar-series. Some studies suggest that this may be due to linear interpolation used to generate missing prewar data. Monte Carlo simulations that support this view generate large standard-errors, making such inference...

Household data adjusted for inflation show that net worth is still below its pre-Great Recession levels, unlike aggregate Federal Reserve data. Poorer and younger households both lost and recovered more net worth percentage-wise. Financial assets have recovered more than non-financial assets.

Many macroeconomic time series variables show signs of periodicity, that is, seasonal heteroskedasticity and seasonally varying autocorrelation structures. This paper argues that these periodic properties could in part be due to data revisions in case such revisions follow a particular format....

PWT 7.0 data deviate substantially from PWT 6.3 data because the benchmarked prices for 1970 to 1996 used in PWT 6.3 were entirely discarded. PWT 7.0 data are unreliable and appear to be much less accurate than PWT 6.3 data.