Antonio Jesus Sanchez Fuentes

Is There a Signalling Role for Public Wages? Evidence for the Euro Area Based on Macro Data

Do public sector wages exert presures on private sector wages, or has private sector a leadership role in wage setting? This paper tries to isolate the pure signalling effect that one sector might exert on the other by controlling for other determinants os wages (prices, productivity, institutions) for the main euro area economies (Germany, France, Italy and Spain) and the periods 1980-2007 and 1991-2007. It exploits avilable quarterly information not yet used in the literature, and combine different data sources in the framework of mixed frecuencies time series models. The quarterly frequency of our data allows us to check the existence of strong evidence of public wages’ leadership, either in conjunction with bidirectional links from the private sector (Germany and Spain) or pure public wage leadership (France in the sample 1991-2007, Italy for within-the-year linkages).Do public sector wages exert presures on private sector wages, or has private sector a leadership role in wage setting?. This paper tries to isolate the pure signalling effect that one sector might exert on the other by controlling for other determinants of wages (prices, productivity, institutions) for the main euro area economies (Germany, France, Italy and Spain) and the periods 1980-2007 and 1991-2007. It exploits avilable quarterly information not yet used in the literature, and combine different data sources in the framework of mixedfrecuencies time series models. The quarterly frequency of our data allows us to check the existence of strong evidence of public wages� leadership, either in conjunction with bidirectional links from the private sector (Germany and Spain) or pure public wage leadership (France in the sample 1991-2007, Italy for within-the-year linkages).

A Toolkit to Strengthen Government Budget Surveillance

In this paper we develop a comprehensive short-term fiscal forecasting system of use for the real-time monitoring of the Spanish government’s borrowing requirement. Spain has been at the centre of the recent European sovereign debt crisis, not least because of sizeable failures in meeting public deficit targets. The system comprises a suite of models, with different levels of disaggregation (bottom-up vs top-down; general government vs sub-sectors), which are suitable for the automatic processing of the large amount of monthly/quarterly fiscal data currently published by the Spanish statistical authorities. Our tools are instrumental in the ex-ante detection of risks to official projections, and can thus help reduce the ex-post reputational costs of budgetary slippage. On the basis of our results, we discuss how official monitoring bodies could expand, on one hand, their toolkit to evaluate regular adherence to targets (moving beyond a legalistic approach) and, on the other, their communication policies as regards sources of risks to (ex-ante) compliance with budgetary targets.

Fiscal Policies in Spain: Main Stylised Facts Revisited

We provide key stylised facts on fiscal policy developments in Spain over the past three decades using quarterly data (1986Q1-2012Q2). First, we compute stylised facts on the cyclical properties of fiscal policies over that period. Next, we report updated evidence on the macroeconomic effects of non-systematic fiscal policies, including updated estimates of their macroeconomic impact (fiscal multipliers) for alternative datasets. To perform the analysis in the paper we built up a comprehensive database of seasonally adjusted quarterly fiscal variables for the period of interest.