Publications

We investigate which firm characteristics are associated with investment in tangible and intangible fixed assets, paying special attention to the case of R&D, and which funding sources are used for each type of investment. Regarding firm characteristics, we find that younger and more profitable firms tend to invest more in all asset types. In the case of size, larger firms invest more in R&D and intangibles but less in tangible fixed assets. In addition, there is a concave relationship between leverage and investment. Regarding funding sources, we find that cash flow is the most important source of funding for intangibles and R&D, whereas financial debt is the most important funding source for tangible fixed assets. Stock issues are used to fund R&D and, especially, tangible fixed assets. Firms use cash holdings to smooth investment in R&D.

This paper studies how the variation in sectoral productivities shapes the sectoral
composition of the Spanish economy from 1980 to 2015. I first document an asymmetric
behavior of sectoral productivities: the productivity of services declines over time, whereas
the productivity of manufacturing increases until the 1990s, before slowing down. I feed the
path of sectoral productivities observed in the data into a model of structural transformation
with two sectors (services and manufacturing) which are connected by an Input-Output
matrix. The model reproduces the variation of the gross output services share of the
Spanish economy between 1980 and 2015. The model implies that – even absent changes
in the trends of sectoral productivities – the annual growth rate of GDP between 2015 and
2050 shrinks by 0.6 percentage points with respect to the average growth rate between
1980 and 2015. Hence, annual GDP growth would decline from 2.3% to 1.7%. If sectoral
productivities were to equal the levels observed in the Euro Area between 1980 and 2015,
the average growth rate of Spanish GDP between 2015 and 2050 would be 2.1%.

The process of internationalisation that many Spanish banks have embarked upon in recent years has resulted in the need for much closer monitoring of the economies in which they are present, especially by a supervisory body such as the Banco de España. In this paper, we present a comprehensive theoretical and empirical modelling approach, developing a set of five country-specific structural BVARs for Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Chile and Peru, the economies representing the largest exposures of Spanish banks to the emerging markets. The results obtained show that our modelling strategy provides useful tools to: (i) analyse the structural shocks that underlie their recent macroeconomic behaviour; (ii) study the impact of certain decisions of policymakers on GDP, inflation and other variables; and (iii) carry out accurate conditional and unconditional projections two years ahead of the most policy-relevant variables. These projections, together with the “analyst’s judgement”, constitute the bulk of our assessment of the future behaviour of these economies.