The responsiveness of long-term household debt to the interest rate is a crucial parameter for assessing the effectiveness of public policies aimed at promoting specific types of saving. This paper estimates the effect of a reform of Credito Bonificado, a large program in Portugal that...

The responsiveness of long-term household debt to the interest rate is a crucial parameter for assessing the effectiveness of public policies aimed at promoting specific types of saving. This paper estimates the effect of a reform of Credito Bonificado, a large program in Portugal that...

Estimating the impact of bank mergers on credit granted and on interest rates requires a framework that allows to disentangle the effect of changes in market structure generated by mergers from the effects arising from changes in banks’ operating environment. However, most of the literature on...

This paper assesses the existence of persistent seasonal effects in the daily returns of the Portuguese stock market. We use daily data on the stock market index to study long-lasting differences in returns across the days of the week, within months and around holidays. For the period 1988-2001,...

The group of contributors in this book come from academia and international organizations in Europe and the USA. They focus on trade unions, which affect real-wage flexibility and the provision of training to workers. They also concentrate on employment protection legislation, which discourages...

We use a unique dataset to show that relationships are an important determinant of banks' ability to access interbank market liquidity. More precisely, we find that: (i) banks with a larger reserve imbalance are more likely to borrow funds from banks with whom they have a relationship, and to...