Recent analyses relate increases in the growth rate of countries to anticipation effects caused by bidding for the Olympic Games, so called news shocks. We argue that these findings should be interpreted cautiously. First, these analyses may suffer from an omitted variable bias because they...

This paper analyses the level of inequality in Spain and how it evolved over the course of the past crisis and the early stages of the current recovery. To this end, it first introduces the various dimensions of wage, income, consumption and wealth inequality, and studies how they have...

A VAR analysis of Swiss data from 1987 to 2015 provides no evidence for significant long and short run influence of leverage on GDP, credit and the interest rate spread. Increasing capital requirements for banks should therefore have no strong negative macroeconomic effects.