The balance sheet adjustment in the household sector was a prominent feature of the Great Recession that is widely believed to have held back the cyclical recovery of the US economy. A key question for the US outlook is therefore whether household deleveraging has ended or whether further...

Global current account imbalances are generally seen as a threat to world growth. Given that they are projected to remain high, in an environment of prevailing downside risks, what could be done to reduce these imbalances? Using NiGEM, a large-scale multi-country model, we build up a global...

This work provides empirical evidence for a sizeable, statistically significant negative impact of the quality of fiscal institutions on public spending volatility for a panel of 25 EU countries over the 1980-2007 period. The dependent variable is the volatility of discretionary fiscal policy,...

Using matched employer-employee data, we examine the wage gaps between immigrant and native workers in the Portuguese labour market in the 2002-2008 period. We use the relation between the Gelbach’s and Oaxaca-Blinder’s decompositions to split the unconditional average wage gap as the sum of...

We augment a medium-scale DSGE model with monetary policy news shocks and …t it to US data. Monetary policy news shocks improve the performance of the model both in terms of marginal data density and in terms of its ability to match the empirical moments of the variables used as observables. We...

Banks individually optimize their liquidity risk management, often neglecting the externalities generated by their choices on the overall risk of the financial system. This is the main argument to support the regulation of liquidity risk. However, there may be incentives, related for instance to...

We examine the role of geographic, economic, and institutional factors in attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Europe, using a cross-section of inward bilateral investments. We estimate and assess the expected benefits, the required reform efforts, and the efficiency of reform options...

This article estimates price-cost margins for the Portuguese markets in a context of imperfect competition in the labour market. The database used includes virtually the universe of Portuguese firms for the period 2005-2009. The results strongly reject the hypothesis of perfect competition in...

Based on Contingent Claims Analysis, this paper develops a method to monitor systemic risk in the European banking system. Aggregated Distance-to-Default series are generated using option prices information from systemically important banks and the STOXX Europe 600 Banks Index. These indicators...

This article offers an extensive overview of competition indicators in the Portuguese economy in the period 2000-2009. The article covers qualitative competition indicators as well as classicalprofitability and concentration measures, focusing on the differences between tradable and non-tradable...