The year 1898 was the year of the disaster. In two naval battles - one in the Caribbean and the other in the Pacific - the Spanish fleet was destroyed and Spain lost its remaining colonies: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The defeat, which brought an end to the nation’s imperial status,...

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...

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...