All economists say that they want to take their models to the data. But with incomplete and highly imperfect data, doing so is difficult and requires carefully matching the assumptions of the model with the statistical properties of the data. The cointegrated VAR (CVAR) offers a way of doing so....

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the wage, price and unemployment dynamics that have taken place in Spain during the last two decades. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the impact of the European economic integration on Spanish labour market and the convergence to a...

Two methodological approaches to empirical economics which are labelled 'theory first' versus 'reality first' are introduced building the background for the discussion of the individual contributions to this special issue.

This survey paper discusses the Cointegrated Vector AutoRegressive (CVAR) methodology and how it has evolved over the past 30 years. It describes major steps in the econometric development, discusses problems to be solved when confronting theory with the data, and, as a solution, proposes a...