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...

We introduce rule-of-thumb consumers in an otherwise standard dynamic sticky price model, and show how their presence can change dramatically the properties of widely used interest rate rules. In particular, the existence of a unique equilibrium is no longer guaranteed by an interest rate rule...

This paper presents a model featuring variable utilization rates across firms due to production inflexibilities and idiosyncratic demand uncertainty. Within a New Keynesian framework, we show how the corresponding bottlenecks and stock-outs generate asymmetries in the transmission mechanism of...

This paper analyzes the effect of the fiscal structure upon the trade-off between inflation and output stabilization in the presence of technological shocks in a DGE model with nominal and real rigidities. The model reproduces the main features of European economies and it integrates a rich menu...

In this paper we use a relatively general intertemporal asset pricing model where housing services and consumption are non-separable to obtain a measure of the potential overvaluation of housing in relation to rents in Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. The results show that part...

In a monetary union, inflation rate differentials may be substantial over the business cycle. This paper parameterizes a two-country monetary union in which different economic structures in the two countries generate temporary inflation differentials. Cross-country differences are introduced in...