We study the impact of (widespread) downward wage rigidity on the fl ows from employment to non-employment at the onset of the Great Recession. Downward wage (growth) rigidity is due to the fact that sector-level collective agreements in Spain are automatically extended to all fi rms, setting...

We estimate the impact on objective measures of financial literacy of a 10-hour financial education program among 15-year-old students in compulsory secondary schooling. We use a matched sample of students and teachers in Madrid and two different estimation strategies. Firstly, we use...

While Spain has traditionally underperformed its European peers in terms of labor productivity, the trend reverses after 2007. The evolution of aggregate productivity in Spain during the Great Recession is shaped largely, albeit not exclusively, by the adverse conditions in the labor market....

This paper studies how financial innovation in sovereign debt markets can increase a country’s level of private investment and welfare. I propose a model where public debt has a liquidity purpose for the domestic private sector and is demanded as a saving vehicle by more patient international...

We assess the impact on the credit supply to non-financial corporations of the two verylong-term refinancing operations (VLTROs) conducted by the Eurosystem in December 2011 and February 2012 for the case of Spain. To do so we use bank-firm level information from a sample of more than one...

There is empirical evidence of a cross-country positive association between the number of lawyers per capita and the extent of litigation. For instance, Spain has more litigation and more lawyers per capita than most OECD countries. How should this association be interpreted? In this paper we...

Asset securitization offers banks the possibility of altering their capital structures and the financial intermediation process. This study shows that the introduction of securitization is associated with fundamental changes in the funding policies of banks. In particular, we present evidence of...

Labor courts may introduce a significant wedge between “legal” firing costs and “effective” (post-trial) firing costs. Apart from procedural costs, there is uncertainty over judges’ rulings, in particular over the likelihood of a “fair” dismissal ultimately being ruled as...

Should rational agents take into consideration government policy announcements? A skilled agent (an econometrician) could set up a model to combine the following two pieces of information in order to anticipate the future course of fiscal policy in real-time: (i) the ex-ante path of policy as...

We propose a Markov-switching dynamic factor model to construct an index of global business cycle conditions, for performing short-term forecasts of quarterly world GDP growth in real time and computing real-time business cycle probabilities. To overcome the real-time forecasting challenges, the...