Commodity price booms, as those recorded in the last decade, may have a significant economic impact in small, commodity exporting, developing countries. Whether the impact on output is positive or negative is still unclear. It depends on various factors, notably on the impact that commodity...

Shrinkage estimators of the covariance matrix are known to improve the stability over time of the Global Minimum Variance Portfolio (GMVP), as they are less error-prone. However, the improvement over the empirical covariance matrix is not optimal for small values of n, the estimation sample...

This article provides new evidence on the nature of occupational differences in unemployment dynamics, which is relevant for the debate between the structural or hysteresis hypotheses. We develop a procedure that permits us to test for the presence of a structural break at unknown date. Our...

We hold the fort for linear specification of monetary policy and economic activity in Europe. Using data on the last two and a half decades we cannot reject the hypothesis that monetary policy is a linear process and we find mixed results regarding economic activity.