Economist has traditionally been skeptical about the potential effects of place-based policies. Some authors (see, e.g., Overman and Nathan, 2013, and Kline and Moretti, 2014) argued that place-based policies are an imperfect solution to deal with social problems, for many reasons. First,...

In this paper, we investigate whether evidence of discriminatory treatment against immigrants in the Spanish mortgage market exists. More specifically, we test whether, ceteris paribus, immigrant borrowers tend to be charged with higher interest rates on their mortgages than their Spanish born...

We propose a simple modification of the time series filter by Hamilton (2018b) that yields reliable and economically meaningful real-time output gap estimates. The original filter relies on 8-quarter ahead forecasts errors of an autoregression. While this approach yields a cyclical component of...

The output gap is a key variable of business cycle analysis and policy. Obtaining reliable estimates for it, is very difficult, though. Most real-time estimates are frequently revised over time. The idea of this paper is to use various indicators, for example from business surveys, that (i) were...