During the global economic crisis, unemployment rates increased dramatically across Europe, especially among the least educated population groups. The picture in Spain in 2012, with unemployment rates running at over 20% and youth employment close to 45%, was discouraging. In face of this situation, the Spanish autonomous government of Extremadura launched a programme specifically aimed at motivating unemployed individuals without a school degree to return to education and earn the compulsory secondary education diploma. This paper applies a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impact of this conditional cash transfer programme using administrative data. The results show that the programme did not increase the likelihood of earning the lower secondary education diploma. This finding is a caveat emptor for governments considering similar policies, and remarks again the importance of testing innovations before generalization.

The Report of the Committee of Experts for the Review of the Local Financing System (2017) proposes replacing the current dual system of transfers with a single equalization system for all Spanish municipalities. The objective of this work is to discuss the suitability of the proposal and compare it with other less demanding alternatives based on distributive transfer formulas. To do this, we estimate the financial cost of each of these alternatives and of their distributive effects among municipalities according to their size and the type of system to which they belong.

This paper analyzes the evolution of the technical efficiency of Spanish regional tax offices with respect to the main devolved taxes for the period 2005–2014. We apply the conditional directional distance function methodology, which allows us to incorporate undesirable outputs into the production function, represented by administrative complaints lodged by taxpayers as an (inverse) measure of the quality of service provision, and account for the influence of the socioeconomic context in which these offices operate. This methodology has been adapted for application in a dynamic context in order to analyze how the performance of these units has evolved over a period that includes different stages of the economic cycle. The main results show that efficiency levels have fallen over the period, especially since the start of the economic recession. Likewise, we identify that the influence of incomes and fiscal capacity are especially significant explanatory factors of this evolution.

Aprovechando la jornada organizada por FIOP y FEDEA para reflexionar sobre el tema, en esta nota queremos insistir en la urgencia de esta reforma, asi como resumir algunas ideas sobre las grandes lineas que deberian orientarla. Esperamos que estas reflexiones puedan concitar el consenso de buena parte de los especialistas.

This paper estimates the evolution of efficiency in the management of the main traditional taxes ceded to the Autonomous Communities during the period 2005-2014. In the empirical analysis, efficiency measures of tax offices' performance are obtained by applying a robust conditional model, with which it is possible to incorporate the influence of socio-economic contextual factors into the estimated scores. In addition, this methodology has been adapted to a dynamic context to assess the performance of these units over a period that includes the latest economic crisis. The main result is that, once we adjust the efficiency scores by contextual variables, the differences across units is relatively small.

The aim of this research is to explore whether teaching basic financial concepts at schools helps to improve students' ability to apply the knowledge and skills that they learn to real-life situations involving financial issues and decision making measured by a standardized financial literacy assessment. To do this, we exploit the rich set of comparative data about the countries participating in the PISA 2012 financial literacy module. Our empirical analysis is based on multilevel (hierarchical) regression modeling including country fixed effects. Our results suggest that the availability of financial education is positively and significantly related to students' financial literacy, regardless of the strategy applied to teach financial concepts. Nevertheless, it has a very small influence compared to the major role played by other individual- and school-level factors. In addition, we find that students receiving courses taught by specialists from private institutions and non-governmental organizations achieve better results than others receiving financial education training from their teachers.

This paper studies the relationship between research performance and teaching quality in the context of the Spanish university system. We investigate whether there is a relationship between being an active researcher and teaching quality of college professors in Spain. We use a data set from the University of Extremadura, which contains information on teaching evaluations and research performance over a ten year, period (from 2001-2002 to 2011-2012). Our results suggest that, on average, professors who are more involved in research obtain better results in their teaching evaluations. We also suggest that this positive link between research and teaching is non-linear, as we find a larger improvement in teaching quality from additional research at lower levels of research intensity. Additionally, we show that the relationship between teaching and research is not constant along the distribution of teaching scores, and that the teaching quality of professors in the lower quantiles is much more related to their research intensity than that of professors in the top quantiles. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The aim of this research is to explore whether the deployment of specialized courses on basic financial concepts at schools has a significant impact on how able students are to apply the knowledge and skills that they learn to real-life situations involving financial issues and decision making. To do this, we exploit the rich set of comparative data about the countries participating in the PISA 2012 financial literacy assessment. This includes 18 of the 70 countries participating in this wave of PISA. Our empirical analysis is based on a difference-in-differences approach comparing the results of the same students across two subjects (financial literacy and reading). We assume that the distribution of students across schools does not depend on the provision of financial education. Thus we can estimate the effect of the treatment as the difference between the performance of students at schools that offer or do not offer financial education courses. Our results suggest that such courses have a significant and positive effect on student achievement regardless of the strategy applied to teach financial concepts.

In this paper, we propose a different way of using the Malmquist index that allows us to further analyze the relative performance divergences between two groups of decision-making units (DMUs) over time when only a pseudo-panel database is available. To do this, we extend the Camanho and Dyson (2006) one-period Malmquist-type index (CDMI) for a pseudo-panel database with a new pseudo-panel Malmquist index (PPMI). To illustrate the methodology, we apply it to examine how the performance gap between public and private government-dependent secondary schools in the Basque Country (Spain) performed across three PISA waves (2006, 2009 and 2012). The results suggest that performance is persistently and significantly higher for private government-dependent schools than for public schools. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.