Active labor market programs (ALMPs) are widely used to boost employment prospects for individuals at risk of social exclusion, though evidence on their effectiveness remains mixed. While most studies focus on single interventions, less is known about the impact of combining multiple ALMPs that may complement each other to enhance both employability and psychological well-being. This paper evaluates the incremental impact of a comprehensive ALMP bundle delivered in partnership with Red Cross Spain to facilitate reinsertion in the labor market. Participants were randomly assigned to a control group with access to Red Cross’s regular services or to a treatment group that received additional interventions, including psychological support, soft skills development, digital literacy, certified professional courses and job search assistance. Using administrative data, we find no significant differential effects of the treatment on employment outcomes immediately after the intervention, or six and twelve months later. However, the program does improve certain outcomes related to employability and personal autonomy. Specifically, it reduces the risk of poor psychological health and enhances frustration tolerance, problem identification, knowledge of available resources and digital skills. Participants also report a higher perceived likelihood of finding a job and use a broader range of job search methods.
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.
