Parenting practices in early childhood lay the foundation for children’s long-term outcomes. However, by shaping how parents interact at home, better parenting skills may also affect the family as a whole. This paper studies the impact of early parenting support on family outcomes using the randomized implementation of Espacios Infantiles: 0-3, a pilot program involving one thousand disadvantaged families in Spain. The intervention improved parenting abilities and led to better short-run household relationships and educational outcomes for children in treated families. We argue that these effects stem from early-childhood guidance fostering parental socio-emotional skills, thereby improving interactions with other family members. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effects are not linked to a particular children’s developmental stage, consistent with the workshops improving parents’ general abilities. These results point to overlooked channels through which parenting support can improve family well-being.
This paper examines Spain’s evolving role in global supply chains, with a focus on the impact of recent trade disruptions—including the US–China trade war—on Spain’s trade dynamics within the European Union. Using detailed product-level data and input–output linkages, we examine how shifts in global trade flows have affected Spain’s exports and imports. We document Spain’s transition from a European-centric trade structure toward greater exposure to China and the USA. Empirical evidence confirms trade diversion: as US tariffs on Chinese goods reduced exports to the USA, Chinese exports to Spain and the EU increased, with Spain gaining access to lower-priced Chinese inputs. However, this also displaced traditional EU suppliers, especially in high-tech sectors. Despite competitive pressures, Spain’s export performance remained resilient, particularly where indirect complementarities emerged. Input–output analysis further highlights Spain’s increasing reliance on Chinese value added, primarily through indirect supply chain channels. Overall, Spain has faced both challenges and opportunities from global supply chain reconfiguration, underscoring its dual role as a competitor and complement in Europe.
Formally universal labor protection policies may generate unequal outcomes when implemented in segmented labor markets. This paper studies how labor market duality shapes access to protection during large economic shocks, using the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain as an unexpected stress test. We combine administrative microdata with detailed information on employment transitions to examine workers’ access to two distinct protection channels: job retention schemes (JRS) and unemployment-related protection. We show that unequal protection during the pandemic operated through two different institutional mechanisms. First, disparities in access to JRS are largely explained by labor market duality. Once contract type and job tenure are taken into account, age-related differences disappear or reverse, indicating that lower coverage among young workers mainly reflects composition effects rather than differential treatment within the scheme. Second, unequal access to unemployment-related protection persists even after controlling for contractual status and tenure. However, this gap is largely absorbed once accumulated labor market experience is taken into account, showing that contribution histories rather than age per se are the main source of disadvantage. Overall, the results show that labor market duality weakens the insurance role of the welfare state during economic crises. More broadly, the paper highlights that the distributional impact of formally universal protection policies depends crucially on the institutional channel through which protection is delivered.
This paper proposes a methodology to extract information about regional economic conditions from newspaper text in real time. The approach relies on large-scale collections of news articles that are summarized using unsupervised machine learning to generate topics capturing recurring themes in economic reporting. Because the method uses the full corpus of regional news and avoids restrictive keyword selection, it minimizes human judgment and allows the data to reveal economically relevant patterns in news coverage. I apply the methodology to Canada, a large and economically diverse country, and show that the resulting topics contain information about fluctuations in economic indicators such as manufacturing activity and unemployment at both the national and provincial levels. The results are robust to alternative choices of the number of topics. A composite index constructed from the topic measures provides a summary indicator of economic information contained in the news. While some topics display similar associations with economic outcomes across provinces, others capture region-specific developments, highlighting the ability of the approach to uncover geographically heterogeneous economic signals in news data.
This paper presents experimental evidence on the effectiveness of personalized social services in promoting the socioeconomic inclusion of vulnerable populations in Spain. We evaluate two randomized controlled trials implemented under the national Inclusion Policy Lab, which complements Spain’s Minimum Income Scheme (IMV). The first trial, conducted in Barcelona, offered individualized inclusion plans and coordinated follow-up through a one-stop service model for a heterogeneous population. The second, in Castilla-La Mancha, targeted vulnerable women and combined personalized case management with integrated social and employment services. Using administrative records and survey data, we find that the Barcelona program had no significant impacts on employment, subjective well-being, or social inclusion. In contrast, the Castilla-La Mancha intervention led to meaningful improvements in perceived employability, mental health, and social inclusion, but no effects on actual employment. Heterogeneous treatment effects reveal more positive impacts for participants previously using municipal social services and those with Spanish nationality in Barcelona, and for rural residents and previously employed in Castilla-La Mancha. Our results suggest that personalization can enhance subjective dimensions of inclusion and engagement but may be insufficient on its own to overcome structural barriers to labor market entry—at least when program duration is limited.
This paper evaluates a program aimed at improving social inclusion among families with children and adolescents receiving Spain’s National Minimum Income scheme (IMV) or Galicia’s Regional Inclusion Income (RISGA) in the seven largest municipalities of the region. The intervention relies on stratified random assignment to assess the effectiveness of a model of personalized and comprehensive support tailored to the needs of each household member. Support is delivered through multiple interventions grouped into three packages: social support, educational support, and employment activation. The control group continues to receive the standard financial assistance and services available under the existing system. The results show that assignment to the program significantly reduces child material deprivation. We also find positive and statistically significant effects on a composite measure of social inclusion, with the largest improvements concentrated in housing conditions, parental responsibility, community integration, and education. These effects remain robust after adjusting for multiple hypothesis testing. By contrast, we do not find evidence of short-run impacts on simplified poverty indicators, employability, or labor income. While the intervention increases job-search activation among household members, this does not translate into measurable improvements in survey-based or administrative employment outcomes over the evaluation period.
Industrial policy is back in vogue, with governments rediscovering their appetite for state-led development. Yet its fortunes often hinge on a neglected variable: institutional quality. This paper reviews the rise, fall, and resurgence of industrial policy, arguing that institutional capacity has been the decisive, if underappreciated, factor separating success from failure throughout this cycle. It then illustrates this argument empirically using EU Cohesion Policy as Europe’s de facto industrial policy, examining regional growth across NUTS-3 regions over 2006–2024 against fund intensity and both the level and the trajectory of regional government quality. The results reveal a systematic empirical pattern: cohesion spending is connected with faster growth only where institutional quality improved; in places with backsliding institutions the association is negligible. Sectorally, “hard” lines—energy, IT, transport, skills, environment—are linked to growth almost everywhere, while “soft” lines—R D, social infrastructure, technical assistance—show a positive association chiefly in regions that managed to improve their governance. Spain offers a cautionary tale: substantial inflows amid deteriorating governance have coincided with thin convergence. These patterns point to a policy-relevant regularity: any industrial strategy that neglects institutional reform risks squandering resources. The analysis suggests that competitive allocation, rigorous monitoring, credible sunset clauses, and, above all, the checks and balances that sustain investments in state capacity should accompany EU transfers. Europe’s strategic ambitions will ultimately rest not just on how much it invests, but on whether it can strengthen the institutional scaffolding that shapes investment returns.
This paper studies the effects of Airbnb on residential mobility and housing prices in Madrid between 2010 and 2018. To identify causal effects, I exploit a neighborhood-year panel and a shift-share instrumental variable strategy based on spatial variation in tourist attractiveness and the rapid expansion of the platform. I find that an increase of 100 entire-home Airbnb listings in a neighborhood reduces annual residential inflows by approximately 50 individuals (2
International migrants choose their country of residence to maximize their utility. As a result, their choices are informative about the relative attractiveness of countries. This paper explains why Spain became the fourth most attractive country in the world for international migrants in the period 2015–2024, what I define as the Second Spanish Immigration Boom of the century. First, an accounting decomposition shows how, contrary to other destinations, Spanish-specific factors, correlated with economic conditions and general migration policies, have a larger weight in explaining immigration to Spain than origin-specific factors. Second, the causal relevance of bilateral visa policies is also shown, particularly in the context of Latin American immigrants, by using origins that are required a visa to enter Spain as a control for visa-free access countries in a generalized differences-in-differences setting. Finally, the effects of the Boom on immigrant selection are also analysed, finding that the Second Boom was different from the first because educational selection improved.
A key challenge in social benefit systems worldwide is the non-take-up (NTU) phenomenon, where eligible individuals do not claim the benefits to which they are entitled. This study evaluates the impact of two policy interventions—an in-person outreach program and a social media campaign—on reducing NTU through a large-scale randomized controlled trial involving 400 low-income neighborhoods in Spain. The interventions, targeted at reducing the NTU for the national minimum income scheme, were designed to address key informational and logistical barriers. The in-person treatment offered tailored support with application procedures and administrative coordination, while the social media campaign provided targeted information via Facebook and Instagram. We find that both interventions significantly increased application rates, though the temporal patterns differed—effects from in-person outreach were immediate, while those from social media emerged with a delay. However, neither intervention led to a substantial increase in benefit approvals, suggesting that while the interventions reduced initial frictions, persistent logistical barriers continue to hinder successful take-up. The results underscore the dual importance of informational and procedural hurdles in explaining NTU and point to the need for sustained, hands-on support to convert applications into successful claims.
As Spain approaches the first scheduled nuclear retirements—most notably, Almaraz in 2027—the debate over the implications of delaying the nuclear phase-out has reopened. This paper uses detailed simulations of the Iberian electricity market to assess the consequences of postponing Almaraz’s closure on wholesale electricity prices, renewable and storage profitability, and power sector CO_2 emissions. We test the robustness of our findings to alternative investment targets, electricity demand paths, and gas marginal costs. We caution against a purely static assessment: while extending Almaraz, holding everything else equal, lowers prices and emissions by displacing gas, it also depresses renewables’ captured prices and increases curtailment, weakening incentives to invest in renewables and storage. If the investment response is large enough, a delayed nuclear phase-out may ultimately lead to higher prices and higher emissions.
This study evaluates the impact of a randomised controlled intervention that provided psychosocial supports and digital skills training to socially excluded female migrants living in Murcia, Spain. The participants were also beneficiaries of the Minimum Basic Income Scheme. Our causal estimation shows that the programme significantly improves participants’ knowledge of community resources, use of social support networks, digital skills, and mental well-being. However, we do not observe any effects on employment or labour-market participation, based on both survey responses and administrative records. These findings suggest that non-financial interventions can enhance social inclusion and personal well-being, even if they do not directly improve labour market outcomes in the short run.
Multiple-choice tests are the gateway to important professional outcomes in the Spanish health sector. Every year, thousands of nursing, psychology, pharmacy, and biology graduates take a multiple-choice test, with wrong answers penalized, in order to access an intern position in a hospital. In such tests, willingness to guess, the decision to provide an answer instead of omitting the question can have a differential effect on the overall performance. This paper first studies the evolution of gender differences in willingness to guess, measured by the proportion of answered questions, over a 40-year period. Second, we exploit a natural experiment that occurred between 2014 and 2015, when the number of alternative answers was reduced from 5 to 4, effectively lowering the penalty for incorrect answers, to test for gender differential reactions in willingness to guess.
While the literature has extensively studied the impact of immigration shocks on cities, we know surprisingly little about how cities absorb large immigration waves. This paper helps fill that gap by analyzing the neighborhood-level population dynamics among Spanish-born residents, non-EU15 immigrants, and EU15 immigrants in Spanish cities during the major immigration wave of 2001–2009. Drawing on the monocentric city model, and within a context of path-dependent urban development with outward city growth, we explore how different population groups sort spatially within cities. Higher-income Spanish-born residents tend to settle in more distant suburbs to access larger housing. In contrast, younger and highly educated EU15 immigrants concentrate in central neighborhoods to benefit from urban amenities. Initially, lower-income non-EU15 immigrants settled in central areas with deteriorated housing stock, but over time they increasingly moved to mid-distance neighborhoods with small dwellings built between 1950 and 1970.
This paper examines the impact of a 22% minimum wage increase in Spain on January 2019 on intimate partner violence using a doubly robust difference-in-differences strategy with inverse probability weighting and the nationally representative Spanish Survey of Violence Against Women. We find no effect of the reform on physical or sexual violence. However, treated women-those with a high predicted probability of working at minimum wage jobs-experienced a 42% increase in psychological violence. Labor market analysis of survey respondents reveals that the reform led to a substitution away from female employment toward her partner's employment, reducing women's bargaining power within the household. For women whose partner is five years older, the increase in violence is not accompanied with lower female labor market engagement, providing evidence of alternative mechanisms, such as disrupted gender roles, or instrumental violence. These findings highlight unintended consequences of wage policy and highlight the need for complementary policies and services addressing the dangers of gender-based and domestic violence.
This paper uses a discrete choice model to recover gender gaps in viewers’ preferences for prime-time media content. First, we document that Spanish female viewers have a stronger preference for watching prime-time television relatively to males. We also find gender differences for specific channels, content genre, and programs. Our results hold both for weekdays and weekends, as well as when controlling for measures of content quality such as program age and program fixed effects. Finally, we use a nested logit model to analyze gender differences in substitutability patterns. The results indicate lower substitutability between mainstream channels for males. That is, male viewers exhibit greater substitution between their preferred mainstream channel at a given time and the outside option, reflecting a stronger male propensity to switch toward alternatives outside mainstream free-to-air broadcasting.
Keynes’s ‘conjecture’ that there are general equilibria of involuntary unemployment that are resistant to falling wages has now been demonstrated, albeit at the cost of making relatively restrictive assumptions about how markets or anticipation functions operate. This article aims to show that a general equilibrium model can be constructed based on assumptions widely accepted by economists, such as rejecting the Keynesian ‘second classical postulate’ and differentiating between households of employees and shareholders. In this model, involuntary unemployment is independent of wages. In this model, unemployment is explained solely by the determinants of effective demand: households’ marginal propensities to consume, the incentive to invest, and the interest rate. This marginal modification of the general equilibrium model calls into question the first welfare theorem, specifically the Pareto optimality of general equilibrium.
We identify and study analytically three key channels that shape how inflation affects wealth inequality: (i) the traditional wealth (or Fisher) channel through which inflation redistributes from lenders to borrowers; (ii) an income channel through which inflation reduces the real value of sticky wages and benefits; and (iii) a relative consumption channel through which heterogeneous increases in the prices of different goods affect people differently depending on their consumption baskets. We then quantify these channels during the 2021 inflation surge in Spain using detailed, high-frequency customer-level data from one of the main commercial banks. The unexpected nature of the inflation shock and its perception as temporary in this period in particular closely fit the assumptions behind our theoretical decomposition. Results show that the wealth and income channels are an order of magnitude larger than the consumption channel. Middle-aged individuals were, in net terms, largely unaffected by inflation, while the elderly suffered the most. We find similar results when using representative surveys on households’ wealth, income, and consumption.
This paper argues that high involuntary unemployment in Europe, unlike in the US, generates political resistance to reducing government spending. Voters consider not only the benefits of public goods but also how fiscal policy affects their employment prospects in rigid labor markets. Employed workers, particularly in the public or subsidized sectors, oppose cuts fearing job loss, while the unemployed support increases to improve job finding chances. This status-dependent distortion of preferences creates positive persistence in public expenditure: Higher initial public employment garners stronger political support against future cuts, leading to sluggish adjustment. In contrast, a competitive labor market yields spending based solely on median voter preferences for public goods, without path dependence. The model shows that persistence arises when the unemployed have less political influence and preferences for public goods are heterogeneous. Empirical examples include France’s resistance to 1990 s austerity, slow subsidy removal in declining industries, and varying transition speeds in post-communist countries.
