House prices in Spain have shown one of the biggest cumulative growth rates among the OECD countries over the past five years and, indeed, over a more extensive period. This paper focuses on analysing this development and its possible determinants. The evidence provided suggests income and...

This paper analyses the informational content of financial prices in Spain, mainly from the viewpoint of a central bank. In particular, we examine the informational content of domestic yields and yield spreads, foreign-domestic spreads, credit quality spreads, stock prices and exchange rates on...

In this paper, we construct a firm-level estimate of the probability of default for a large sample of Spanish firms that can be interpreted as a composite measure of individual corporate financial pressure. By combining firms' accounting data from the Central Balance Sheet Data Office of the...

This paper uses panel data on banks, for the period 1991-98, to test the existence of a banklending channel in the Spanish economy. In order to distinguish between loan demand and supply movements, several exercises are performed. First, we analyse the differential responses, to monetary policy...

This paper falls under the literature on weighted monetary aggregates that seeks to relax the assumption of perfect substitutability of assets implicit in the use of traditional monetary aggregates. Specifically, using the methodology recently proposed by Feldstein and Stock, an estimation is...

This paper analyses the cyclical behaviour of bank credit, loan losses and provisions for loan losses in Spain. These three variables are strongly cyclical in Spain -as in many other countries- and this poses some problems to bank supervisors and regulators. In a context of strong competitive...

This paper offers a comprehensive comparison of the structure of banking and financial markets in the euro area. Based on this, several hypotheses about the role of banks in monetary policy transmission are developed. Many of the predictions that have been proposed for the U.S. are deemed...

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar los incentivos fiscales a la adquisición de viviendas en España, mediante la construcción de una medida de la cuña fiscal sobre el coste de uso, para el período 1986-2004, a partir de un conjunto amplio de casos particulares. Los resultados confirman...

Taking the Spanish market for deposits as a case study we show the importance of properly controlling for the quality of the services provided when assessing the degree of banking competition. While a simple approach based on estimating the price elasticity of the residual supply of deposit...

This paper studies the existence and the scale of education externalities in the unemployment durations suffered by workers in the UK. First, we develop a theoretical model. Using a matching framework we show that a rise in the average level of education of a labour market will affect...