In 2013 Spain introduced a series of educational reforms explicitly inspired by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 results. These reforms were mainly implemented in secondary education – based upon the assumption that this is where Spain’s educational problems...

We examine policies directed at regulating tobacco consumption through three types of instruments: (i) an excise tax hindering consumption by increasing the price of cigarettes, (ii) prevention programs helping consumers to make choices that are more time consistent when trading-off the current...

This paper explores how diversity affects individuals’ employment prospects, using data from the French Labor Force Survey. Employment correlates positively with local labor market diversity, but negatively with neighborhood diversity. Using an instrumental variable approach to deal with local...

This paper presents an axiomatic characterization of difference-form group contests, that is, contests fought among groups and where their probability of victory depends on the difference of their effective efforts. This axiomatization rests on the property of Absolute Consistency, stating that...

The article examines public-private sector wage differentials in Spain using microdata from the Structure of Earnings Survey (Encuesta de Estructura Salarial). When applying various decomposition techniques, we find that it is important to distinguish by gender and type of contract. Our results...

Academics and policymakers have shown great interest in cross-national comparisons of intergenerational earnings mobility. However, producing consistent and comparable estimates of earnings mobility is not a trivial task. In most countries researchers are unable to observe earnings information...

Relevant advances in the mitigation of environmental impact could be obtained by the appropriate diffusion of existing environmental technologies. In this paper, we look at the diffusion of knowledge related to environmental technologies developed within the oil and gas industry. To assess...

We analyse how market competition in a vertically differentiated polluting industry is affected by product variants that comply at different levels with "green" social norms. A green consumption behavior is considered as a byword of good citizenship. Consumer preferences depend on a combination...

This paper is an empirical study of redistributive preferences. Our interest is what motivates net contributors to support redistributive policies. Using instrumental variable estimation and exploiting a particularity of the Spanish labour market we estimate how workers’ declared preferences...

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing separately for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can separately identify these cycles and account for general year effects. For the executive branch, we show that it...