Can terrorist attacks be timed to change the outcome of democratic elections? In this paper, we analyze the electoral impact of the terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004, in Madrid. Studies using individual level postelectoral survey data reach contradictory conclusions. We propose an alternative...

We analyze the determinants of real estate and credit bubbles using a unique borrower-lender matched dataset on mortgage loans in Spain. The dataset contain real estate credit and price conditions (loan principal and spread, and the appraisal and market price) at the mortgage level, matched with...

In this paper we present a new approach to measure the effect of infrastructures on firms’ location. We use fixed size rectangles around the roads as the unit of analysis instead of the traditional approach based on regions or municipalities. We apply this approach to Spain, which is an...

This paper studies the determinants of school choice, focusing on the role of information. We consider how parents’ search efforts and their capacity to process information (i.e., to correctly assess schools) affect the quality of the schools they choose for their children. Using a novel...

This paper introduces a mixture model based on the beta distribution, without preestablished means and variances, to analyze a large set of Beauty-Contest data obtained from diverse groups of experiments (Bosch-Dom`enech et al. 2002). This model gives a better fit of the experimental data, and...

Foreign aid provides a windfall of resources to recipient countries and may result in the same rent seeking behavior as documented in the "curse of natural resources" literature. In this paper we discuss this effect and document its magnitude. Using data for 108 recipient countries in the period...