We study a model where student effort and talent interact with parental and teachers' investments, as well as with school system resources. The model is rich, yet sufficiently stylized to provide novel implications. We can show, for example, that an improvement in parental outside options will...

We study the effect of standardized external tests on students’ academic outcomes. We exploit the fact that only one of the 17 Spanish regions started doing and publishing the results of standardized tests in 2005 to apply a difference-in-difference methodology, using outcomes of the PISA...

We investigate the trade-off, arising in financial networks, between higher risksharing and greater exposure to contagion when the connectivity increases. We find that with shock distributions displaying "fat" tails, extreme segmentation into small components is optimal, while minimal...

We study a model that integrates productive and socialization efforts with network choice and parental investments. We characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of this game. We first show that individuals underinvest in productive and social effort, but that solving only the investment...

Evaluamos un programa que introdujo la educación bilingüe en inglés y castellano en educación primaria en algunos colegios públicos de la Comunidad de Madrid en el año 2004. En este programa, los estudiantes no solo estudian inglés como idioma extranjero, sino que el inglés es la lengua...

Estudiamos el efecto de pruebas estandarizadas externas sobre los resultados académicos de los estudiantes. Explotamos el hecho de que sólo una de las 17 regiones españolas empezó realizando y publicando los resultados de las pruebas estandarizadas en 2005 para aplicar una metodología de...

Using the Spanish micro data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), we first document how the excessive gap in employment protection between indefinite and temporary workers leads to large differentials in on-the-job training (OTJ) against the latter....

This study reviews the recent literature on the economics of education, with a special focus on policy interventions. It also attempts to uncover the importance of school inputs, social environment and parental background on the outcomes of a standardized exam for all sixth grade students in the...

We study the dynamic support for fiscal decentralization in a political agency model from the perspective of a region. We show that corruption opportunities are lower under centralization at each period of time. However, centralization makes more difficult for citizens to detect corrupt...

This paper reports a 3-phase experiment on a stylized labor market. In the first two phases, agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects’ social and reciprocity concerns, together with their beliefs. In the last phase, four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete...