If space may be conceptualized as a natural resource, much like gas, oil, or minerals, then its production and use can also be thought of as something to be properly managed, taken care of, and not wasted. Limiting the expansion of the footprint of built-up land in urban areas forces this...

ln recent years, and especially in the wake of the upheavals of 1989, there has been a growing perception that the "socialist experiment" has failed and that the "free market" has finally been vindicated as the only successful, realistic model for economic activity. What has become of the...

This Paper is the result of the Bank of Italy-CEPR project to construct a monthly coincident indicator of the business cycle of the euro area. The index is estimated on the basis of a harmonized data set of monthly statistics of the euro area (951 series) which we constructed from a variety of...

This paper constructs a theoretical model to study the effects on employment of the introduction of flexible labour contracts (i.e. with low firing costs), which occurred in many European countries in the 1980s, which it then tests on Spanish data. The model predicts that such contracts increase...

This paper shows how particle filtering allows us to undertake likelihood-based inference in dynamic macroeconomic models. The models can be nonlinear and/or non-normal. We describe how to use the output from the particle filter to estimate the structural parameters of the model, those...