Recent evidence on the effect of government spending shocks on consumption cannot be easily reconciled with existing optimizing business cycle models. We extend the standard New Keynesian model to allow for the presence of rule-of-thumb (non-Ricardian) consumers. We show how the interaction of...

This paper presents evidence that the existence of deposit and lending facilities combined with an averaging provision for the reserve requirement are powerful tools to stabilize the overnight rate. We reach this conclusion by comparing the behavior of this rate in Germany before and after the...

House prices in Spain have shown one of the biggest cumulative growth rates among the OECD countries over the past five years and, indeed, over a more extensive period. This paper focuses on analysing this development and its possible determinants. The evidence provided suggests income and...

El trabajo pretende profundizar en la evolución de los determinantes de la demanda de las exportaciones de manufacturas en los países de la UEM así como en la distinta respuesta de estas ante cambios en sus variables explicativas. Para ello se han estimado para cada uno de los países de la...

This paper studies the recent empirical evidence available on the evolution of the real exchange rates within the main European economies in order to understand the possible main determinants of future inflation differentials within the EMU. The real exchange rate is decomposed into that of the...

This paper focuses on the effects of fiscal policy in Spain analysed in a VAR context. Fiscal shocks are found to have small, though significant, effects on GDP, private consumption, private investment, interest rates and prices. The pattern of responses and the multipliers obtained seem to...

Exchange rates in Latin America display a large volatility, constitute a central element of the policy strategies and their evolution have an important impact on financial stability due to the dollarization of liabilities which most countries exhibit. However, assessments on equilibrium exchange...

This paper considers the "trade-off" and "pecking order" theories, the two most influential approaches to understanding firms' capital structure decisions. The paper adopts two approaches to examining capital structures using firm-level panel data for firms in both Spain and the United Kingdom....

This paper analyses the impact of alternative measures of firms' financial health on their investment and employment decisions. The emphasis is on the analysis of disaggregated data on such financial indicators. For this purpose, itemised data from a sample of the non-financial firms reporting...

The paper tests whether there were events of contagion, and portfolio shift, in the sovereign bond markets of eleven emerging countries' between January 1995 and November 2001. From existing definitions, we narrow down the concept of contagion by focusing on pricing errors, after general market...