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In this article, we aim to estimate what the cost of Covid-19 has been in terms of unemployment for Spain. We use a simple autoregressive model to simulate what the unemployment rate would have been without the pandemic and we compare this with the actual values. We also forecast the unemployment rate for 2021 and 2022 to analyse the persistence of the pandemic shock to unemployment.

In this article, we analyse the evolution of the real effective exchange rate (REER) as a measure of competitiveness for a group of Central and Eastern European countries. To do this, we employ unit‐root tests with breaks and estimate the equations with structural breaks. Our results show that even though the REERs have become flatter, which means less competitiveness is lost against main trading partners, they have also become less mean‐reverting, suggesting that shocks now tend to have longer effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we contribute to the long literature on how fiscal policy affects the real economy. In particular, we focus on how government consumption affects private consumption for a pool of European economies. We estimate panel vector error correction models between the two consumption variables for the EU 28 + Norway and Switzerland, for the two periods before and after 2008. The results show that government consumption affects private consumption differently in the periods before and after 2008. This means an increase in government consumption could have a positive impact on private consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we investigate house price misalignments and how they affect the real economy. We estimate the long-term relationship between house prices and the fundamentals that determine long-term house prices for a panel of European countries with dynamic OLS, using data from 2005–2018. We find that income has been the main driver of fundamental house prices in all countries, while the supply of dwellings has calmed the rise in house prices in some of them. We calculate house price misalignments, which are deviations of house prices from the fundamental value, and we employ them in the growth model. The results of the growth regression indicate that house price imbalances amplify business cycles in the short term, but in the long term house price overvaluations slow economic growth down. The findings imply that it is crucial to take measures to stabilize housing cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substantial capital outflows across Europe following the 2007/8 Global Financial Crisis and 2010 European Sovereign Debt crisis raise concerns regarding potential capital outflows from the economies of Central and Eastern European countries. To shed light on country‐level factors that can mitigate crisis and potential capital outflows across these countries, this article investigates which factors have influenced the evolution of their current accounts. Our analyses, using dynamic ordinary least squares, suggest that the long‐run determinants of the current account have indeed changed over time, and threshold cointegrated estimates also confirm that, for each country, the parameters are dependent on thresholds for certain variables and there is significant heterogeneity across the countries. Our overall results are robust to complementary analyses, such as threshold estimation approach. We comment on some possible implications of these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]