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...

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...

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...

Increasing renewable penetration has given rise to a series of challenges as regards the ability of electricity systems to balance supply and demand, particularly with high levels of intermittent renewable generation. This new scenario requires a detailed quantitative assessment of the way in...

Increasing renewable penetration has given rise to a series of challenges as regards the ability of electricity systems to balance supply and demand, particularly with high levels of intermittent renewable generation. This new scenario requires a detailed quantitative assessment of the way in...

In this paper we analyze the temporal profile of crime in the urban context of Barcelona (Spain) for the period 2007-2011 using a unique micro dataset with police reported crime. Additionally, we assess the temporal effect that a leisure activity clearly bounded in time, namely the matches...

The literature on horizontal tax interdependence pays limited attention to interactions in administrative policies, although they can play a large role in determining the amount of tax revenues collected. We investigate the incentives for sub-central tax authority cooperation in a decentralized...

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 examines how firm age can affect a firm’s perception of the obstacles (deterring vs. revealed) that hamper and delay innovation. Using a comprehensive panel of Spanish firms for the period 2004-2011, the empirical analysis conducted shows that distinct types of obstacle are...