The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...

This paper presents estimates based on individual data of downward nominal and real wage rigidities for thirteen sectors in Belgium, Denmark, Spain and Portugal. Our methodology follows the approach recently developed for the International Wage Flexibility Project, whereby resistance to nominal...

This paper measures how households smooth changes in consumption when incomes are shifted by permanent or transitory shocks at country and regional level. I compute insurance capacity using the Spanish Continuous Family Expenditure Survey skipping the imputation methods used by the previous...

We estimate the importance of preference interdependence from consumption choices. Our strategy follows the literature that tests the constraints imposed by optimality in the evolution of individual consumption. We derive a Euler equation from a preference specification that allows for...

In this paper we analyze changes in the conditional distributions of male earnings in Spain during the 1980s. We use a large new database of records on individual workers and firms from the Spanish Social Security system for the period 1980-1987. The data set is an unbalanced panel subject to...

This paper presents estimates of wealth effects on consumer spending using the first wave of a new survey of Spanish household finances (EFF) that contains direct measures of asset holdings and consumption. A distinguishing feature of the EFF is the availability of such information from a...

Spain faces the highest unemployment rate among the European Union countries (22.2%), and Portugal the lowest (7.3%). However, superficially, these two countries share common labour market features: they both have the most stringent job security rules in the OECD, the architecture of their...

We study the link between culturally inherited household structure and wealth distribution in international comparisons using household data for the US and Spain (the SCF and the EFF). We estimate counterfactual US distributions relying on the Spanish household structure. Our results show that...

The purpose of this paper is to estimate elasticities of scale in the demand for money by firms using firm level panel data. In common with the recent literature, we use disaggregate data to overcome the identification problems in aggregate time series approaches. Our main dataset is a sample of...