Over the period 19952006 the Spanish economy experienced a rapid increase in employment and output growth, a surge in investment over GDP, a substantial deterioration in the current account balance and an improvement in the finances of the social security system. This paper presents a dynamic...

Using data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey (Encuesta de Poblacioń Activa) from 1999 through 2007, we explore the role of employment opportunities in explaining the growing immigrant flows of recent years. Subsequently, we investigate whether immigrant inflows have helped reduce regional...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees, makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...