We explore the implications of the differential behavior of total factor productivity across sectors to understand the dynamics of the relative prices of services to manufacturing sectors. We find that contrary to the predictions of the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis, the evolution of relative...

In this paper we present a simple, theory-based measure of the variations in aggregate economic efficiency associated with business fluctuations. We decompose this indicator, which we refer to as “the gap”, into two constituent parts: a price markup and a wage markup, and show that the...

In this paper we first present supporting evidence of the existence of heterogeneity in inflation dynamics across euro area countries. Based on the estimation of New Phillips Curves for five major countries of the euro area, we find that there is significant inertial (backward looking) behavior...

This paper addresses the issue of measuring the NAIRU in the Spanish economy. We implement some of the procedures proposed in the literature to estimate the NAIRU, describing their advantages and disadvantages. Our analysis shows that these alternative approaches provide significantly different...

The main contribution of this paper is to jointly estimate the effects of financial development and inflation on growth. We aim to exploit both the cross-section and the time-series dimension of the data on inflation, growth and some banking and stock market indicators over the period 1961-1993...

We provide evidence on the fit of the New Phillips Curve (NPC) for the Euro area over the period 1970-1998, and use it as a tool to compare the characteristics of European inflation dynamics with those observed in the U.S. We also analyse the factors underlying inflation inertia by examining the...

In this paper we construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for a small open economy allowing for perfect capital mobility. The model incorporates price rigidities in monopolistically competitive goods and labor markets and real rigidities in the form of capital adjustment costs....

The liquidity effect, defined as a decrease in nominal interest rates in response to a monetary expansion, is a major stylized fact of the business cycle. This paper seeks to understand under what conditions such an effect can be explained in a general equilibrium model with sticky prices and...

We construct a measure of Euro area cyclical efficiency, following the approach developed in Galí, Gertler and López-Salido (2002). Our measure –which we call "the gap"– corresponds to the inverse of price over social marginal cost. Here we present a time series of this gap for the Euro...