This article explores the behavior of exchange rates in Spain during the XVIII century. We posit that exchange rates were the result of both government intervention over nominal values of currencies and the estimate that the market –of bills of exchange- gave to the value of the currency. We...

The economic theory has proved that free entry is not always advantageous from a social welfare point of view. Fro instance, a number of inefficiencies can arise from free entry in the presence of fixed set-up costs. Then, an excessive number of firms can usually be settled in homogeneous produc...

This paper proposes a consistent test for the goodness-of-fit of parametric regression models which overcomes two important problems of the existing tests, namely, the poor empirical power and size performance of the tests due to the curse of dimensionality and the choice of subjective...

In this article we propose a new method for testing nonstationary cycles in financial time series data. In particular, we use a procedure due to Robinson (1994) that permits us to test unit root cycles in raw time series. These tests have several distinguishing features compared with other...

In this paper we use Spanish stock market data to identify the bull and bear phases of the market and to analyze its characteristics during the period 1941-2002. We compare these characteristics with those of the US and of two other European countries (Germany and the UK). Our sample is divided...

Absenteeism among manual workers is, without doubt, one of the most significant factors to affect the functioning of assembly lines in developed markets. That high levels of absenteeism have negative repercussions on the quality and costs of operations is a widely held view. According to the...

In this paper we build a model of a dollarized economy with imperfect financial markets to analyze and qualify the common view that countries with higher dollarization exhibit higher pass-through. We show that the classic inflationary effects of a real depreciation -higher internal demand and...

The stabilization effects of Taylor rules are analyzed in a limited participation framework with and without credit market imperfections in capital goods production. Financial frictions substantially amplify the impact of shocks, and also reinforce the stabilizing or destabilizing effects of...

This paper proposes a mechanism that can be operated without money in situations where agents have to decide over some common projects when they are not informed about others' preferences. The success of the mechanisms proposed in the literature to deal with similar problems usually relies on...

This paper identifies structural breaks in the post-World War II joint dynamics of U.S. inflation, unemployment and the short-term interest rate. We derive a structural break-date procedure which allows for long-memory behavior in all three series and perform the analysis for alternative data...