As in many other developed countries, the share of skilled workers in Spain’s labor force dramatically increased during the 1990s. This paper decomposes the aggregate skill mix change by a set of key firm characteristics and in the context of Spain’s dual labor market. We find that...

Studies of the volatility of the U.S. economy suggest a noticeable change in mid 1980s. There is some empirical evidence that the aggregate volatility of the U.S. economy has been decreasing over time. The response of firms to the change of economic volatility and economic fluctuation has been...

As 2004 is a leap year and some holidays are situated at weekends, it possesses three working days more than 2003. An analysis based on a seasonal time series model estimates an increase in production by 0.1 percent for the whole year. The working-day effect is analysed for total GDP as well as...

In this work, I present an extension of Kydland and Prescott’s (K&P) model. The extension is to consider that prices and wages are nominal and that economic agents anticipate the probability of occurrence of exogenous shocks. Once calibrated the model, I compute the nominal and real dynamic...

In this paper, we bring together in a systematised fashion the scattered empirical evidence relating firm dynamics and both short-run and long-run macroeconomic dynamics. There are numerous studies that focus on firm-level data while controlling for macroeconomic conditions, which cover a...

I apply the Beveridge-Nelson business cycle decomposition method to the time series of murder in the United States (1900-2004). Separating out “permanent” from “cyclical” murder, I hypothesize that the cyclical part coincides with documented waves of organized crime, internal tensions,...

Procedures are developed to compute the proportion of turning points located in the sample path of time series data. It is shown that the proportion of turning points can be directly related to the data generating process. Methods for estimating model parameters are developed using counts of...

Every economy experiences peaks and troughs in its business cycle. It has always been the researchers’ interests to identify the underlying causes of shocks. In the business cycle literature, there exists a new strand of methodology that allows the analysis at a disaggregated level using the...

One channel of business cycle shock transmission which gained attraction only recently is the confidence channel. The aim of the paper is to find out whether the confidence channel is actually working between the US and Germany. This is analysed using times series methods. In contrast to other...