This paper investigates how much of the current account adjustment after the global financial crisis in Spain can be explained by cyclical factors. For this purpose, we extend the IMF's external balance assessment methodology to allow for country-specific slopes and intercepts. The good fit of...

This paper uncovers an inverted U-shaped relationship between firm exit and total factor productivity (TFP) growth using Spanish data. At low levels of firm exit, Schumpeterian cleansing effects dominate and the effect of firm destruction on TFP is positive, but when exit rates are very high,...

This paper studies the public sector wage gap in Spain, by gender, skill level and type of contract, using recent administrative data from tax records. We estimate wage distributions in the presence of covariates separately for men and women in the public and in the private sectors, and we take...

Both global imbalances and financial market (de-)regulation feature prominently among the potential causes of the global financial crisis, but they have been largely discussed separately. In this paper, we take a different angle and investigate the relationship between financial market...

A well-known empirical regularity is that small firms are less productive than large firms. However, does size cause productivity or vice versa? Using firm-level administrative data for Spain, I find that productivity shocks are followed by significant increases in size defined by employment. In...

How do housing bubbles affect other economic sectors? We show that in the presence of collateral constraints, a bubble initially raises housing credit demand and crowds out credit to non-housing firms. If the bubble lasts, however, housing credit repayments raise banks' net worth and expand...

We show that bank shocks originating in the fi nancial sector propagate upstream and downstream along the production network and triple the impact of direct bank shocks. Our identi fication relies on the universe of both supplier-customer transactions and bank loans in Spain, a standard...

Using credit-registry data for Spain and Peru, we document that four main types of commercial credit-asset-based loans, cash-flow loans, trade finance and leasing-are easily identifiable and represent the bulk of corporate credit. We show that credit dynamics and bank lending channels vary...

We provide a framework to study how different allocation systems of public procurement contracts affect firm dynamics and long-run macroeconomic outcomes. We start by using a newly created panel data set of administrative data that merges Spanish credit register loan data, quasi-census...

The sovereign debt crisis in the euro area has increased the interest in early warning indicators, with the aim to indicate the build?up of fiscal stress early on and to facilitate crisis prevention by a timely counteraction of fiscal and macroeconomic policies. This paper presents possible...