Catalonia's economy is characterized by linguistic diversity and provides a unique opportunity to measure the incidence of language proficiency on over-education, particularly, whether individuals with deficient language skills tend to acquire more formal skills or, on the contrary, become...

This paper analyzes the problem of matching heterogeneous agents in a Bayesian learning model. One agent gives a noisy signal to another agent, who is responsible for learning. If production has a strong informational component, a phase of cross-matching occurs, so that agents of low knowledge...

This paper proposes a common and tractable framework for analyzing different definitions of fixed and random effects in a contant-slope variable-intercept model. It is shown that, regardless of whether effects (i) are treated as parameters or as an error term, (ii) are estimated in different...

In this paper we analyze a mechanism that is particularly relevant to the workings of the Great Recession: we explain how easier home financing and higher homeownership rates increase unemployment rates. To this purpose we build a model of job search with liquid wealth accumulation and...

I discuss the application of capture-recapture methods to estimating the total number of deaths in armed conflicts, and propose an alternative method based on a trivariate discrete choice model. Data come from the 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' (TRC) of Peru, around 25000 deaths,...

In multilingual labor markets agents with high proficiency in more than one language may be selected into occupations that require high levels of skill in communicating with customers or writing reports in more than one language. In this paper we measure this effect in Catalonia, where two...

This paper evaluates the determinants of school attendance and work of rural adolescents between 10 and 18 years old in 1997-1998 for a sample of Latin American countries. Rural adolescents are quite disadvantaged relative to their urban counterparts. The share of rural adolescents studying...

This article examines the relationship between wealth accumulation and job search dynamics. It proposes a model in which risk-averse individuals search for jobs, save, and borrow to smooth their consumption. One motivation for accumulating wealth is to finance voluntary quits in order to search...