Whether the likelihood of credit booms ending is dependent on its age or not, or whether the respective behaviour is smooth or bumpy are important issues to which the economic literature has not given attention yet. This paper tries to fill that gap in the literature, exploring those issues with...

This paper aims at estimating money demand for the euro area, the US and the UK using a dynamic ordinary least squares estimator (DOLS). Our findings show that: (i) wealth effects on money demand are important in the euro area and the UK; (ii) the impact of changes in the interest rate on real...

This paper analyses the neutrality of technology using data from the NBER-CES Manufacturing industry database. We show that technology has a positive effect on the skilled-to-unskilled labour and wage ratios, offering a skill-premium for these skilled workers. We also find that technology has...

This paper examines if the European integration process, by transferring policy instruments to supra-national authorities, has affected voters’ evaluations of governments’ economic performance at electoral periods. The analysis is implemented on a panel of 15 EU countries, from 1970 to 2011....

This paper studies the effects of price regulation and parallel imports in the onpatent pharmaceutical market. First, we develop a theory model in which a pharmacy negotiates producer prices with a brand-name firm and then sets retail prices. We show that the effects of price regulation...

We study the incentives for hospitals to provide quality and expend cost-reducing effort when their budgets are soft, i.e., the payer may cover deficits or confiscate surpluses. The basic set up is a Hotelling model with two hospitals that differ in location and face demand uncertainty, where...

This paper assesses the determinants of the length of fiscal consolidation using annual data for 17 industrial countries over the period 1978-2009. Relying on a narrative approach to identify fiscal consolidation episodes, we show that fiscal variables (such as the budget deficit and the level...

This paper analyses the presence of duration dependence in local governments’ tenure employing continuous and discrete-time duration analyses over a set of spells of time in office for the period 1979-2005. Our results show that the more time a party remains in office, the higher is the...

This paper analyzes the effects of voter turnout on the vote shares received by the incumbent government. A system of simultaneous equations is estimated using a panel dataset of 278 Portuguese municipalities, for the period 1979-2005, covering 10 legislative elections. The results indicate that...

We characterize the interrelation of CO2 prices with energy prices (gas and electricity), and with economic activity. Previous studies have relied on time-domain techniques, such as Vector Auto-Regressions. In this study, we use multivariate wavelet analysis, which operates in the time-frequency...