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...

Did financial institutions with better governance arrangements weather the recent financial crisis better? And how about those with more qualified chairmen? We answer these questions in the context of the Spanish Savings and Loans (Cajas). We find that neither formal governance institutions...

We show that preferences-bias towards overprovision or underprovision can explain the asymmetric location of electoral candidates with respect to the median voter. We analyze the determinants of preferences off-the-peak and find that: (i) The sign of the third derivative of the policy-induced...

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...

En este artículo cuantificamos las consecuencias para la economía española de subir los tipos del Impuesto sobre el Valor Añadido (IVA). Con este fin comparamos los resultados de dos modelos econímicos: un modelo de crecimiento neoclásico tradicional con un hogar y una empresa...

This paper studies the recent evolution of the Spanish economy in the context of the developments of the world economy and presents a benchmark model with …nancial frictions to assess the sources of these ‡uctuations. We pay particular attention to the comparison with the United States and...

What is the meaning of green shoots? In this paper we provide a statistical definition of this term which allows us to analyze where, when and how the recovery started. With the same methodology, we coform that the symptoms of recovery are clear in the US, the Euro area and Spain with some...

This paper describes a quantitative model developed to account for the change in the level of house prices (boom-and-bust cycle) in Spain. The driving forces behind the housing boom are residential investment, immigration, current account deficits, and the elimination of land regulation. 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 presents new evidence on the evolution of adult height across Spanish regions for cohorts born between 1950 and 1980 using the available augmented sample of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for Spain. This augmented sample is available only for the year 2000, and collects...