Over the last decade, Spain created more jobs than any other country in Europe; however, now it is destroying them at an equal pace. Nevertheless, the relationship between the level of employment and the level of self-employment has remained relatively stable. In this context, there is a...

This article re-examines the persistence in natural gas consumption using an alternative methodology. In particular we report estimates of an unobserved components model, in which hysteresis exists if cyclical and natural gas consumptions do not evolve independently. In addition, this framework...

Human capital obtained through education has been shown to be one of the strongest drivers of entrepreneurship performance. The entrepreneur's human capital is, though, only one of the input factors into the production process of her venture. The value of other input factors, such as (knowledge)...

Spain is destroying more jobs than any other European country. In the third quarter of 2009, the unemployment rate stood at 17.9%, the second-highest rate in the 27-nation EU and the highest rate in the euro area (EA-16). The exponential growth of the Spanish unemployment rate is the by-product...

An often applied labour market policy to combat unemployment is to stimulate unemployed individuals to start their own businesses. Such policy may at least, temporarily lead to increases in self-employment, in particular, in the number of own-account workers. These policies may be called...

In the last decade, an increasing body of literature has studied the relation between economic development and the rate of independent entrepreneurship. For several developed countries, this relation seems to have changed from a negative relation into a positive one. However, the role of...

Human capital obtained through education has been shown to be one of the strongest drivers of entrepreneurship performance. The entrepreneur’s human capital, though, is only one of the input factors into the production process of her venture. In this paper we will analyze to what extent the...

This paper estimates an unobserved components model to explore coal consumption in the USA. We ask whether coal consumption exhibits hysteresis, defined as a dynamic structure in which the cyclical component of coal consumption has permanent effects on the natural component. In contrast to...

The New Growth Theory has put the issue of endogenous technical change back into the center of attention. Although the statistical material available to the researcher wanting to investigate the economic influence of technological innovation is not very adequate, the aim of this paper is to...

In this paper we examine some differential facts of the Andalusian labour market in comparison with the Spanish one, concentrating on the higher incidence of youth unemployment in Andalusia. Our results show that the probability that the Andalusian young workers quickly find their first...