Sigma-convergence in the OECD: Transitional Dynamics or Narrowing Steady State Differences?

The empirical literature of growth has steadly improved the econometric methods used mainly to address the effect of cross-country heterogeneity in the estimated convergence rate. In this paper, we highlight an important implication of this process of econometric refinement that has so far received little attention. We show that the picture that emerges from models that allow for generalised heterogeneity changes our view of the process of convergence within the OECD. Estimation methods that allow for non or partial heterogeneity stress the importance of transitional dynamics in the process of convergence. Thus sigma-convergence is mostly accounted for by beta-convergence. On the contrary, …

Households' Balance Sheets and the Effect of Fiscal Policy

Using households' balance-sheet composition in the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, we identify six household types. Since 1999, there has been a decline in the share of patient households and an increase in the share of impatient households with negative wealth. Using a six-agent New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions, we explore how changes in households' shares affect the transmission of government spending shocks. We show that the relative share of households in the left tail of the wealth distribution plays a key role in the aggregate marginal propensity to consume, the magnitude of fiscal multipliers, and the distributional consequences of government spending shocks. W…

Household Leverage and Fiscal Multipliers

We study the size of fiscal multipliers in response to a government spending shock under different household leverage conditions in a general equilibrium setting with search and matching frictions. We allow for different levels of household indebtedness by changing the intensive margin of borrowing (loan-to-value ratio), as well as the extensive margin, defined as the number of borrowers over total population. The interaction between the consumption decisions of agents with limited access to credit and the process of wage bargaining and vacancy posting delivers two main results: (a) higher initial leverage makes it more likely to find output multipliers higher than one; and (b) a positive g…

Crecimiento económico y convergencia en la OCDE, 1960-1990

Shifts in the Beveridge Curve in spain and their macroeconomic effects.

In this article, we construct a homogeneous series of vacancies for the Spanish economy from 1980 to 2016, which enables us to perform an analysis of the effects of the economic cycle on the relationship between unemployment and vacancies. The methodology proposes a link between the old series of vacancies from the former INEM (National Employment Institute) and the new series from Eurostat. To that end, we use the information from the Short-Term Labour Survey. An analysis of this new homogeneous series shows that the Beveridge curve shifted between 2008 and 2009 due to the worse efficiency of the process of matching vacancies and unemployed workers. A simulation of the macroeconomic effect…