This paper is the first to explicitly explore the differences in firms' financial constraints between and within sectors of economic activity, by estimating the sensitivities of cash holdings to cash-flow upon an unique dataset of Portuguese firms. It shows that, not only there are remarkable...

Water supply services are Services of General Interest (SGI), subject to specific public service obligations, such as universality, continuity, quality, affordability, transparency, and consumer protection. There is an extensive empirical literature on the design of optimal prices. However,...

Today's shortage of financial resources calls for the attention of researchers to the problem of financial constraints faced by firms. In this paper we analyse firms' financial constraints by estimating both investment-cash flow sensitivities and cash-cash flow sensitivities upon a large...

The issue of whether the likelihood of an expansion or contraction ending is dependent on its age,i.e whether they are duration dependent, is widely addressed in the business cycles literature and evidence of positive duration dependence is found in several studies. However, there is an...

We assess the response of monetary policy to developments in asset markets in the Euro Area, the US and the UK. We estimate the reaction of monetary policy to wealth composition and asset prices using: (i) a linear framework based on a fully simultaneous system approach in a Bayesian...

Option price data is often used to infer risk-neutral densities for future prices of an underlying asset. Given the prices of a set of options on the same underlying asset with different strikes and maturities, we propose a nonparametric approach for estimating risk-neutral densities associated...

Industrial relations are in flux in many nations, perhaps most notably in Germany and Britain. That said, comparatively little is known in any detail of the changing pattern of the institutions of collective bargaining and worker representation in Germany and still less in both countries about...

Atypical work arrangements have long been criticized as offering more precarious and lower paid work than regular open-ended employment. In an important paper published in this journal, Booth et al. (2002) were among the first to recognize that notwithstanding their potential deficiencies, such...

Will the current crisis accelerate the PIGS collapse? We approach the subject by comparing the responses of the unemployment rate to an output shock on those economies (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) with those of a benchmark economy – the USA. Our methodological strategy relies on one of...

This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been most pronounced. Using workplace-level data and a common model, we present decompositions of changes in collective bargaining and worker representation...