We study how a 10-hour course about personal finance delivered in compulsory secondary education affects a wide range of student's outcomes over a three months horizon. The contents of the course covered budgeting, banking relationship and saving vehicles, but also awareness about future...

In several OECD countries employer federations and unions fix skill-specific wage floors for all workers in an industry. One view of those “explicit” contracts argues that the prevailing wage structure reflects the labor market conditions back at the time when those contracts were bargained,...

Economic theory predicts that individuals exposed to the risk of losing their job postpone their consumption and accumulate more assets to build a buffer stock of saving. We provide a new test of the hypothesis using substantial variation in severance payments across contracts in the Spanish...

We estimate the impact on objective measures of financial literacy of a 10-hour financial education program among 15-year-old students in compulsory secondary schooling. We use a matched sample of students and teachers in Madrid and two different estimation strategies. Firstly, we use...

We study the impact of (widespread) downward wage rigidity on the flows from employment to non-employment at the onset of the Great Recession. Downward wage (growth) rigidity is due to the fact that sector-level collective agreements in Spain are automatically extended to all firms, setting wage...

The response of human capital accumulation to changes in the anticipated returns to schooling determines the type of skills supplied to the labor market, the productivity of future cohorts, and the evolution of inequality. Unlike the US, the UK or Germany, Spain has experienced since 1995 a drop...