This paper examines the presence of political cycles inside the Portuguese governments’ aggregate expenditures by using annual data for 10 expenditure components. The results indicate that the choice of the expenditure components to be increased during election periods by Portuguese...

This paper analyses the presence of duration dependence in Portuguese local governments’ tenure employing continuous and discrete-time duration analyses over a set of spells of time in office for the period 1979-2005. Our results show that the more time a party remains in office, the higher is...

Desde a década de 50 que um grupo de países tem vindo a evidenciar níveis de inflação elevados durante longos períodos de tempo sem que as necessárias medidas de estabilização sejam adoptadas com a devida celeridade. Essas medidas são muitas vezes adiadas, sendo os respectivos...

Using OLS and quantile regression methods and rich cross-section data sets for western and eastern Germany, this paper demonstrates that the impact of works council presence on labor productivity varies between manufacturing and services, between plants that are or are not covered by collective...

We know from experience that weak economic growth increases the unemployment rate. In 1962 Okun proposed to measure potential output in terms of unemployment gap. From this relation a direct link between increase in unemployment and output growth was deduced, known as the Okun Law. This Law is...

Evidence of instability of the wealth effect in the USA is presented through the estimation of a Markov switching model of the long-run aggregate consumption function. The dating of the regimes appears to bear relation to movements in asset prices. A model-based explanation of the findings is...

This paper uses data from a nationally representative panel of establishments to estimate the effects of German works councils on firm performance, 1997-2000. We analyze the impact of this institution on sales and sales growth using OLS and fixed effect estimates of a translog production...

Volatility is a fundamental parameter for option valuation. In particular, real options models require project volatility, which is very hard to estimate accurately because there is usually no historical data for the underlying asset. Several authors have used a method based on Monte Carlo...

This paper discusses the role played by internal restructuring vis-à-vis external restructuring in industry productivity growth, arguing that the contribution of these two components is expected to be sensitive to the economic cycle. The study describes gross flows (job and output) over a...