This paper focuses on comparing public and private individual wealth over the life-cycle, when individuals face an uncertain length of life. We also analyze how a fully funded and actuarially fair Social Security affects the desire to annuitize private wealth. Within this framework, we find that...

Dentro de las políticas activas de empleo, los programas de Orientación para el Empleo suponen actualmente -en términos de acciones- más de la mitad de las políticas puestas en marcha por los servicios públicos de empleo. Asimismo, los recursos económicos destinados a dichas medidas han...

After the seminal paper by McCallum, various authors have estimated the effect of regional and national borders on trade. This paper digs deeper into the matter, estimating how the internal and external border effect is affected by the non-linear relation between trade and distance at different...

As recession and financial crisis spread across Europe an increasing number of people are at risk of poverty and social exclusion. Children are more exposed to the risk of poverty and social exclusion than the overall population of the EU. The current climate of economic downturn calls out for...

Time series filtering methods such as the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter, with a consensual choice of the smoothing parameter, eliminate the possibility of identifying long swing cycles (e.g., Kondratieff type) or, alternatively, may distort periodicities that are in fact present in the data,...

This paper analyzes the international transmission of shocks in economies with financial frictions. In a two-country flexible price monetary model with distribution costs in the imported good I study the transmission of shocks to productivity, money supply, government spending and to...

We present in this paper a model that explains the role of the external financing of capital in the evolution of a primitive economy constituted by families and firms. Our aim is to clarify which are the essential financial elements that in more complex and advanced economies could explain the...

In this paper we use the Spanish Living Conditions Survey (2005-2008) to investigate whether there is a socioeconomic gradient in health when alternative measures of socioeconomic status, apart from income, are considered. In particular we construct a material deprivation index that reflects...

Monetary models of exchange rates tend to focus on inflation differentials to explain exchange rate movements. This paper assesses the ability of currency flows to predict exchange rate changes. The focus is on Japan. Currency flows are assumed to depend on the level of the current account and...

The yen has experienced several big swings over recent decades. This paper argues that the fluctuations of the Japanese exchange rate resulted mainly from corresponding movements in the current account, which affected the demand for yen relative to other currencies. The paper builds a vector...