Miquel Clar

Wage Flexibility and Labour Market Institutions: A Meta-Analysis

Evidence during the nineties about the response of real wages to shocks highlights that this response is substantially lower in European countries than in the United States and that there are important differences among European countries. Which are the reasons that explain these different reactions? In this paper, we apply meta-analytical techniques in order to provide a quantitative summary of the available evidence regarding the influence of labour market institutions on real wage flexibility. We find that the design of the study affects the obtained results, and that in more deregulated labour markets with a lower presence of trade unions, this response is particularly larger.

National versus sectoral shocks: new evidence for the manufacturing sector in European countries

Abstract Using data for European countries from 1976 to 1998, this paper shows that the relative importance of country-specific shocks versus (common) sectoral shocks has reduced considerably during the most recent years, probably as a result of more intense policy co-ordination.

Forecasting business and consumer surveys indicators–a time-series models competition

The objective of this article is to compare different time-series methods for the short-run forecasting of Business and Consumer Survey Indicators. We consider all available data taken from the Business and Consumer Survey Indicators for the Euro area between 1985 and 2002. The main results of the forecast competition are offered not only for raw data but we also consider the effects of seasonality and removing outliers on forecast accuracy. In most cases, the univariate autoregressions were not outperformed by the other methods. As for the effect of seasonal adjustment methods and the use of data from which outliers have been removed, we obtain that the use of raw data has little effect on forecast accuracy. The forecasting performance of qualitative indicators is important since enlarging the observed time series of these indicators with forecast intervals may help in interpreting and assessing the implications of the current situation and can be used as an input in quantitative forecast models.

Specialization in Europe and asymmetric shocks: Potential risks of EMU

One of the most obvious consequences of a monetary union is that monetary policy is lost as an instrument of national macroeconomic policy. The loss of the exchange rate as a national policy instrument has important implications for macroeconomic stability in the presence of asymmetric shocks, unexpected shocks that do not affect every nation in an equal way. The empirical literature on Optimum Currency Areas has concluded that the probability of asymmetric shocks to occur at a national level has tended to diminish in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as a result of the intensification of the integration process during the most recent years. Therefore, since Economic Geography Theories predict an increasing specialisation of regions as a result of reallocation of industrial activity, the degree of asymmetry of industry-specific shocks will be specially relevant to determine if benefits overweight the costs associated to EMU. Previous studies, such as Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1995), Helg et al. (1995) or Ghosh and Wolf (1997), have examined to what extent sectoral asymmetric shocks have been relevant in the past using, mainly, static measures of asymmetries such as the correlation coefficients between series of sectoral shocks previously calculated from VAR or sVAR models (Blanchard and Quah, 1989; Blanchard and Katz, 1992). In this paper, we study the evolution of industry-specific asymmetries in Europe from a dynamic point of view (applying the methodology proposed by Boone, 1997) in order to obtain new evidence about the potential risks of EMU in the scenario proposed by Economic Geography Theories.

A dynamic analysis of asymmetric shocks in EU manufacturing

Available empirical evidence regarding the degree of symmetry between European economies in the context of Monetary Unification is not conclusive. This study offers new empirical evidence concerning this issue related to the manufacturing sector. Instead of using a static approach as most empirical studies do, the dynamic evolution of shock symmetry is analysed using a state-space model. The results show a clear reduction of asymmetries in terms of demand shocks between 1978 and 1996, with an increase in terms of supply shocks at the end of the period.

A state-space approach for measuring regional manufacturing production indices

In this paper we propose a latent variable model, in the spirit of Israilevich and Kuttner (1993), to measure regional manufacturing production. To test the validity of the proposed methodology, we have applied it for those Spanish regions that have a direct quantitative index. The results demonstrate the accuracy of the methodology proposed and show that it can overcome some of the difficulties of the indirect method applied by the INE, the Spanish National Institute of Statistics.