The Phillips curve has flattened in Spain over 1995-2006: unemployment has fallen by 15 percentage points, with roughly constant inflation. This change has been more pronounced than elsewhere. We argue that this stems from the immigration boom in Spain over this period. We show that the New...

The Phillips curve has flattened in Spain over 1995-2006: Unemployment has fallen by 15 percentage points, with roughly constant inflation. This change has been much more pronounced than elsewhere. We argue that this stems from the immigration boom in Spain over this period. We show that the New...

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...

Our goal here is to explain the strikingly different response of Spanish unemployment relative to other European economies, in particular France, during the ongoing recession. The Spanish unemployment rate, which fell from 22% in 1994 to 8% in 2007, reached 19% by the end of 2009, whereas the...

Collective bargaining regulation in Spain was put in place at the beginning of the 1980s and, despite successive labour market reforms, its main ingredients are still intact. In this paper we argue that the Spanish regulation of collective bargaining fits neither the current Spanish economic...