Grade retention practices are at the forefront of the educational debate. In this article, we measure the effect of grade retention on Spanish students' achievement by using data from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We find that grade retention has a negative impact on...

Grade retention practices are at the forefront of the educational debate. In this paper, we use PISA 2009 data for Spain to measure the effect of grade retention on students’achievement. One important problem when analyzing this question is that school outcomes and the propensity to repeat a...

Parents and policy-makers often wonder whether and how the choice of a tracked or mixed educational system affects the equality of opportunity. I answer this question by analyzing the influence of peers on future educational results. I define an equal opportunity policy as one that maximizes the...

This paper examines unemployed workers' declared willingness to work for wages lower than the one adequate for their qualification. We analyze which personal and economic characteristics determine this willingness and how it changes along the individuals' unemployment spells. The main results...

The discussion about the need for Social Security reforms has recently resurfaced, and is expected to continue to be part of the political agenda in the near future. Our paper is a step in the direction of providing a framework for policy analysis that accounts for employment uncertainty,...

Reliable empirical evidence about the effects of unemployment insurance benefits (UIB) on individuals’ labour market paths is crucial for designing appropriate labour market policies. In particular, medium and long-run effects of the UIB system can differ markedly from short-term impact when...

Recently, Hahn (2008) has proposed the mixture between the uniform and the beta distributions as an alternative to the beta distribution in PERT methodology which allows for varying amounts of dispersion and a greater likelihood of more extreme tail-area events. However, this mixture lacks a...