This paper proposes a method that takes into account the calendar of European and Belgian intraquarterly data releases to automatically update GDP growth expectations or nowcasts in realtime. The role of surveys is well known in the nowcasting literature, but this is the first paper that has...

The literature points out that retail trade regulations may have a significant impact on prices, employment and productivity. In the case of Spain, the retail trade sector is subject to a rich set of regional regulations. This paper provides a database and a set of indicators on the main...

Changes in sovereign ratings are strongly asymmetric, as downgrades tend to be deeper and faster than upgrades. In other words, once a country loses its initial status it takes a long time to recover it. Using S&P data, we characterise “rating cycles” in terms of their duration and...

In this paper, we put forth the view that the potential for urbanisation economies increases with interaction opportunities. On the basis of that premise, three properties are key to an agglomeration index, which should: (i) increase with the concentration of population and conform to the...

In periods of market stress, portfolio reallocations in bond markets reflect both safety and liquidity concerns. Using sovereign and national agency bonds, we construct indicators of liquidity premia in major euro area bond markets; we document the weakening of the correlation between core and...

We analyse the incidence of endogenous entry and firm TFP-heterogeneity on the response of aggregate inflation to exogenous shocks. We build up an otherwise standard DSGE model in which the number of firms is endogenously determined and firms differ in their steady state level of productivity....

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...

The problem of optimal estimation of missing observations in stationary Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) models was solved in Jones (1980). Extension of his aproach to nonstationary integrated ARMA (i.e., ARIMA) models posed serious problems, having mostly' to do with the specification of...