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...

We use a unique dataset to estimate the impact of a large credit supply shock on employment in Spain. We exploit marked differences in banks' health at the onset of the Great Recession. Several weak banks were rescued by the State and they reduced credit more than other banks. We compare...

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...

Internal migration rates in Spain, in particular interregional ones, are relatively low in comparison with those in other developed countries, in spite of persistent sizeable differences in per capita income and unemployment rates across its regions. In this paper I describe the evolution of...

Over the last quarter century, the Spanish unemployment rate has gone from 3.5% to 24% of the labor force, and then back to 13%. In this paper we describe this extraordinary evolution more in detail, discuss the main shocks and institutions behind it, and provide a set of policy implications...

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...