The Dynamics of Entrepreneurship: Hysteresis, Business Cycles and Government Policy

This paper estimates an unobserved components model to explore the macro dynamics of entrepreneurship in Spain and the US. We ask whether entrepreneurship exhibits hysteresis, defined as a macro dynamic structure in which cyclical fluctuations have persistent effects on the natural rate of entrepreneurship. We find evidence of hysteresis in Spain, but not the US, while in both countries business cycle output variations significantly affect future rates of entrepreneurship. The article discusses implications of the findings for the design of entrepreneurship policies.hysteresis, unobserved components model, time series models, business cycles, self-employment, entrepreneurship

How did the Sovereign debt crisis affect the Euro financial integration? A fractional cointegration approach.

This paper examines financial integration among stock markets in the Eurozone using the prices from each stock index. Monthly time series are constructed for four major stock indices for the period between 1998 and 2016. A fractional cointegrated vector autoregressive model is estimated at an international level. Our results show that there is a perfect and complete Euro financial integration. Considering the possible existence of structural breaks, this paper also examines the fractional cointegration within each regime, showing that Euro financial integration is very robust. However, in the financial and sovereign debt crisis regime, IBEX 35 appears to be the weak link in Euro financial integration, unless Euro financial integration recovers when this period ends

Energy consumption in the US reconsidered. Evidence across sources and economic sectors

This study analyzes the impact of GDP shocks in USA on primary energy consumption and the reverse impact in a comprehensive and novel framework, distinguishing by economic sectors (commercial, industrial, residential and transportation) and energy source, i.e., total fossil (coal, natural gas and petroleum), nuclear, and renewable (hydroelectric, geothermal and biomass) for the period 1973:1 to 2015:2. To this end, we apply Granger causality analysis through the Hatemi-J [1] and Toda and Yamamoto [2] approaches from a time series perspective to evaluate the existence of asymmetries on this bidirectional relationship. The empirical results suggest that the impact of GDP on primary energy consumption is heterogeneous and energy source-specific, and an asymmetric behavior appears among cycles. Moreover, it seems clear that the US economy is highly dependent on petroleum energy consumption. The renewable energy sources do not seem to show any relationshipsources seem to show no relationship with economic growth, and finally, our results suggest that energy consumption in the industrial sector is key to economic growth and is also very sensitive to negative economic shocks

Testing for Hysteresis in Entrepreneurship in 23 OECD Countries

We explore the macro structure of entrepreneurship rates in a panel of 23 OECD countries over 1972-2006. We find that rates of entrepreneurship in OECD’s countries exhibit persistence rather than hysteresis. Implications for the design of entrepreneurship policies are discussed

The Dynamics of Entrepreneurship: Hysteresis, Business Cycles and Government Policy

This paper estimates an unobserved components model to explore the macro dynamics of entrepreneurship in Spain and the US. We ask whether entrepreneurship exhibits hysteresis, defined as a macro dynamic structure in which business cycle fluctuations have persistent effects on the natural rate of entrepreneurship. We find evidence of hysteresis in Spain, but not the US, while in both countries business cycle output variations significantly affect future rates of entrepreneurship. The article discusses implications of the findings for the design of entrepreneurship policies

Fiscal sustainability, monetary policy and economic growth in the Euro Area: In search of the ultimate causal path.

To assess the ultimate causal flow between monetary policy indicators, fiscal sustainability and economic growth has been deeply studied in the literature. However, this issue is still open to discussion due to mixed results and caveats/limitations of existing studies. Importantly, previous analyses mostly focus on bivariate/trivariate systems, missing a relevant piece of economic drivers. We analyze jointly these interdependencies by applying multivariate Granger Causality and determining an ultimate "causality path" excluding redundant relationships. Thus, we combine recent developments introduced to estimate the Granger causality procedure based on Meta-analysis in heterogeneous mixed panels and graphical models searching iteratively for the existing dependencies between a multivariate set of information. Our results provide novel empirical evidence suggesting that monetary policy variables play a leading role in the resulting complex economic system. Furthermore, we do find evidence supporting the role of Total Expenditure as a driver of fiscal policy.Instituto Complutense de Estudios InternacionalesTRUEMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)inpres

Energy consumption in the US reconsidered. Evidence across sources and economic sectors

This study analyzes the impact of GDP shocks in USA on primary energy consumption and the reverse impact in a comprehensive and novel framework, distinguishing by economic sectors (commercial, industrial, residential and transportation) and energy source, i.e., total fossil (coal, natural gas and petroleum), nuclear, and renewable (hydroelectric, geothermal and biomass) for the period 1973:1 to 2015:2. To this end, we apply Granger causality analysis through the Hatemi-J [1] and Toda and Yamamoto [2] approaches from a time series perspective to evaluate the existence of asymmetries on this bidirectional relationship. The empirical results suggest that the impact of GDP on primary energy consumption is heterogeneous and energy source-specific, and an asymmetric behavior appears among cycles. Moreover, it seems clear that the US economy is highly dependent on petroleum energy consumption. The renewable energy sources do not seem to show any relationshipsources seem to show no relationship with economic growth, and finally, our results suggest that energy consumption in the industrial sector is key to economic growth and is also very sensitive to negative economic shocks

The Yield Curve as a Recession Leading Indicator. An Application for Gradient Boosting and Random Forest

Most representative decision-tree ensemble methods have been used to examine the variable importance of Treasury term spreads to predict US economic recessions with a balance of generating rules for US economic recession detection. A strategy is proposed for training the classifiers with Treasury term spreads data and the results are compared in order to select the best model for interpretability. We also discuss the use of SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) framework to understand US recession forecasts by analyzing feature importance. Consistently with the existing literature we find the most relevant Treasury term spreads for predicting US economic recession and a methodology for detecting relevant rules for economic recession detection. In this case, the most relevant term spread found is 3-month–6-month, which is proposed to be monitored by economic authorities. Finally, the methodology detected rules with high lift on predicting economic recession that can be used by these entities for this propose. This latter result stands in contrast to a growing body of literature demonstrating that machine learning methods are useful for interpretation comparing many alternative algorithms and we discuss the interpretation for our result and propose further research lines aligned with this work

Fiscal sustainability, monetary policy and economic growth in the Euro Area: In search of the ultimate causal path

To assess the ultimate causal flow between monetary policy indicators, fiscal sustainability and economic growth has been deeply studied in the literature. However, this issue is still open to discussion due to mixed results and caveats/limitations of existing studies. Importantly, previous analyses mostly focus on bivariate/trivariate systems, missing a relevant piece of economic drivers. We analyse jointly these interdependencies by applying multivariate Granger Causality and determining an ultimate ”causality path” excluding redundant relationships. Thus, we combine recent developments introduced to estimate the Granger causality procedure based on Meta-analysis in heterogeneous mixed panels and graphical models searching iteratively for the existing dependencies between a multivariate set of information. Our results provide novel empirical evidence suggesting that monetary policy variables play a leading role in the resulting complex economic system. Furthermore, we do find evidence supporting the role of Total Expenditure as a driver of fiscal policy.Sánchez-Fuentes acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project PID2019-105517RB-I00)