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We study the effect of women’s education on fertility and children’s health during a period of gender equalization and women’s greater access to economic opportunities. In 1980, Spain raised the minimum working age from 14 to 16, while the compulsory education age remained at 14. This reform changed the within-cohort incentives to remain in the educational system. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the reform delayed fertility but did not impact the completed fertility of affected women. We also show that the reform was detrimental to the health of the children of affected mothers at delivery. We document two channels for this adverse effect: the postponement in the entrance of motherhood and the deterioration of mothers’ health habits (such as smoking and drinking). However, in the medium run, these more educated mothers reverse the adverse health shocks at birth through maternal vigilance and investment in their children’s health habits. Jiménez-Martín gratefully acknowledges the support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities (MICINN) through PID2020- 114231RB-I0 and from Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (Barcelona School of Economics CEX2019-000915-S), Cabrales acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities (MICINN) through PID2021- 126892NB-I00, from MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, Spain through the María de Maeztu Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D CEX2021-001181-M and from Comunidad de Madrid, Spain through EPUC3M11 (V PRICIT), and Bellés-Obrero acknowledges support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through CRC TR 224 (Project A02).

Data de publicació electrònica: 13 de febrer de 2023 We exploit a country-wide child labor regulation that eliminated the difference in school/work alternatives for children born at the beginning and the end of the year to identify the causal effect of education on migration at low levels of schooling. By not relying on changes to the school system, we are more confident that our results are not driven by unobserved changes in school quality evolving differentially across regions. The results of a difference-in-differences methodology combined with an exploration of maternal characteristics and a regression discontinuity design suggest that internal migration hardly changed after the reform. A consideration of the external validity of this finding is also provided. Jorge González Chapela acknowledges financial support from the Government of Aragón, grant S32-20R. Sergi Jiménez-Martín acknowledges financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, proyecto PID2020-114231RB-100. Judit Vall Castello acknowledges financial support from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, proyecto PID2021-126652NB-I00.

We study whether caregiving and intergenerational transfer decisions are sensitive to changes in economic incentives following the inception of a new unconditional and universal system of allowances and supports, after the introduction of the 2006 Promotion of Personal Autonomy and Care for Dependent Persons Act (SAAD in Spanish), and the ensuing effects of its austerity cuts after 2012. We find that whilst the introduction of a caregiving allowance (of a maximum value of €530 in 2011) increased the supply of informal caregiving by 20-22 percentual points (pp), the inception of a companion system of publicly subsidised homecare supports did not modify the supply of care. Consistent with an exchange motive for intergenerational transfers, we estimate an average 17 pp (8.2-8.7pp) increase (decrease) in downstream (upstream) transfers among those receiving caregiving allowances. Our estimates resulting from the reduction in the allowances and supports after the austerity cuts in 2012 are consistent with our main estimates, and suggest stronguer effects among lower-income families.

Uno de los retos de la política económica para los próximos años será el aumento de la participación laboral de los trabajadores de edad avanzada. Por ello es muy importante entender bien las posibles conexiones entre los incentivos que proporcionan las distintas políticas de seguro ofrecidas tanto a los jubilados como a los trabajadores empleados y desempleados de edad avanzada. Encontramos que una versión simplificada de la reforma de pensiones de 2011 (sin jubilación anticipada a los 61 ni jubilación parcial) es capaz de contener el gasto en pensiones (entre el 20 y el 30 por ciento) y posponer sustancialmente la salida del mercado laboral (aumento del volumen de empleo a lo largo de ciclo vital en torno al 1-2 por ciento). Finalmente, analizamos una reforma que, además de los elementos de la reforma simplificada de 2011, permite compatibilizar empleo y pensión y aumenta el premio a pedir la pensión después de los 67. Esta reforma permite aumentar (como producto de la acción voluntaria de los agentes) la fuerza laboral entre 1-2 por ciento sin afectar a las finanzas del sistema de pensiones, que podrían mejorar hasta un 2% adicional. One of the challenges of economic policy for the coming years will be to increase the labor force participation of older workers. It is therefore very important to understand the possible connections between the incentives provided by different insurance policies offered both retirees and workers employed and unemployed elderly. We find that a simplified version of the Spanish pension reform of 2011 (no early retirement at 61 or partial retirement) is capable of containing pension expenditure (between 20 and 30 percent) and substantially delay the exit from the labor market (increased volume of employment along the life cycle around the 1-2 percent). Finally, we discuss a reform that, in addition to simplified elements of the reform of 2011, allows claiming while keeping work and increases the premium to posponed retirement beyond 67. This reform can increase (as a result of the voluntary action of the agents) workforce between 1-2 percent without affecting the finances of the pension system, which could improve by up to 2%.

This paper analyzes the reasons for the scarce development of the private long-term care insurance market in Spain, and its relationship with health insurance. We are also interested in the effects the crisis has had both on the evolution of the demand for long-term care insurance and on the existence of regional disparities. We estimate bivariate probit models with endogenous variables using Spanish data from the Survey on Health and Retirement in Europe. Our results confirm that individuals wishing to purchase long-term care insurance are, in a sense, forced to subscribe a health insurance policy. In spite of this restriction in the supply of long-term care insurance contracts, we find its demand has grown in recent years, which we attribute to the budget cuts affecting the implementation of Spain's System of Autonomy and Attention to Dependent People. Regional differences in its implementation, as well as the varying effects the crisis has had across Spanish regions, lead to the existence of a crowding-in effect in the demand for long-term care insurance in those regions where co-payment is based on income and wealth, those that have a lower percentage of public long-term care beneficiaries, or those with a smaller share of cash benefits over total public benefits. Copyright © 2016 John WileySons, Ltd.

We use an exogenous variation in the Spanish legal working age to investigate the effect of education on fertility and infant health. The reform introduced in 1980 raised the minimum legal age to work from 14 to 16 years old. We show that the reform increased educational attainment, which led to 1786 more women remaining childless and 3307 less children being born in the 10 generations after the reform. These negative effects operate through a postponement of first births until an age where the catching up effect cannot take place. We show that woman’s marriage market is one channel through which education impacts fertility, delaying the age at which women marry for the first time and reducing the likelihood that a woman marries. Even more importantly, this postponement in fertility seems to be also detrimental for the health of their offspring at the moment of delivery. The reform caused 2,789 more children to be born with less than 37 weeks of gestation, 268 died during the first 24 hours of life and 4,352 were born with low birth weight. We are able to document two channels that contribute to the negative effects on infant health: the postponement in age of delivery as well as a higher employment probability of more educated women, which enhances unhealthier behaviors (smoking and drinking).

In this paper we explore the effects of a labor market reform that changed the statutory minimum working age in Spain in 1980. In particular, the reform raised the statutory minimum working age from 14 to 16 years old, while the minimum age for attaining compulsory education was kept at 14 until 1990. To study the effects of this change, we exploit the different incentives faced by individuals born at various times of the year before and after the reform. We show that, for individuals born at the beginning of the year, the probabilities of finishing both the compulsory and the post-compulsory education level increased after the reform. In addition, we find that the reform decreases mortality while young (16-25) for both genders while it increases mortality for middle age women (26-40). We provide evidence to proof that the latter increase is partly explained by the deterioration of the health habits of affected women. Together, these results help explain the closing age gap in life expectancy between women and men in Spain.

We use an exogenous variation in the Spanish legal working age to investigate the ef-fect of education on fertility and infant health. The reform introduced in 1980 raised the minimum legal age to work from 14 to 16 years old. We show that the reform increased educational attainment, which led to 1786 more women remaining childless and 3307 less children being born in the 10 generations after the reform. These negative effects operate through a postponement of first births until an age where the catching up effect cannot take place. We show that woman's marriage market is one channel through which education impacts fertility, delaying the age at which women marry for the first time and reducing the likelihood that a woman marries. Even more importantly, this postponement in fertility seems to be also detrimental for the health of their offspring at the moment of delivery. The reform caused 2,789 more children to be born with less than 37 weeks of gestation, 268 died during the first 24 hours of life and 4,352 were born with low birth weight. We are able to document two channels that contribute to the negative effects on infant health: the postponement in age of delivery as well as a higher employment probability of more educated women, which enhances unhealthier behaviors (smoking and drinking).

Unemployment rates in developed countries recently reached levels not seen in a generation, and workers of all ages are facing increasing probabilities of losing their jobs and considerable losses in accumulated assets. These events have increased the reliance that most (older) workers have on public social insurance programs, exactly at a time that public finances are suffering from a large drop in contributions. Using administrative and household level data, we empirically characterize a Life-Cycle model of retirement and claiming decisions in terms of the employment, wage, health, and mortality uncertainty faced by individuals. We analyze the role of three intertwined factors in the recent evolution of work and retirement benefits claiming behavior in the United States; namely, higher unemployment uncertainty, higher unemployment benefits, and wealth shocks. We find that higher employment uncertainty reduces work and increases early claiming, while higher unemployment benefits mildly reduce work and reduce claiming at early ages. Finally, negative wealth shocks increase both early claiming and work. When all these factors are combined, the final outcome is a mild decline in labor supply and relatively little variation in early claiming.

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, something that has been relatively overlooked in terms of its link with retirement decisions. In this context, we explicitly consider the participation decision of older individuals along with their decision to claim Social Security retirement benefits, using a sequential decision structure. We have numerically solved and simulated a benchmark model of the inter-temporal decision problem that individuals face in the United States. Our results show that the model is able to explain with great accuracy the strikingly high proportion of individuals who claim benefits exactly at the Early Retirement Age. The model is also able to replicate the declining labor force participation at older ages. Additionally, we discuss a number of policy experiments that suggest that individuals claiming and labor supply decisions are responsive to measures likely to be on the table for policy makers when considering the reforms of the U.S. Social Security system.

In contrast to most EU countries and other developed economies, the Wage Skill Premium (WSP) has been steadily falling over the past decades in Spain. The main purpose of this work is to document and explain the fall in the WSP in Spain over the past two decades using Social Security data. Our estimation procedure follows and extends Dustman and Meghir (2005), which allows us to estimate the returns to various sources of experience, as well as seniority, while controlling for the likely biases and endogeneity associated with these models. The results reveal that the fall in the WSP can be explained in part by an increase in the share of college graduates that are mismatched, that is, working in positions for which they are a priori overeducated. However, this phenomenon only partially explains the fall in the WSP: differences between high and low-educated workers in the returns to all types of experiences and tenure have been substantially reduced since the end of the 90s.

In this paper, we explore the links between pension reform, early retirement, and the use of unemployment as an alternative pathway to retirement. We use a dynamic rational expectations model to analyze the search and retirement behaviour of employed and unemployed workers aged 50 or over. The model is calibrated to reproduce the main reemployment and retirement patterns observed between 2002 and 2008 in Spain. It is subsequently used to analyze the effects of the 2011 pension reform in Spain, characterized by two-year delays in both the early and the normal retirement ages. We find that this reform generates large increases in labour supply and sizable cuts in pension costs, but these are achieved at the expense of very large welfare losses, especially among unemployed workers. As an alternative, we propose leaving the early retirement age unchanged, but penalizing the minimum pension (reducing its generosity in parallel to the cuts imposed on individual pension benefits, and making it more actuarially fair with age). This alternative reform strikes a better balance between individual welfare and labour supply stimulus.

The minimum pension program is one of the key welfare programs in many developing and developed countries and a key influence in retirement of low income workers or workers with intermittent working careers. The main purpose of minimum benefits programs is to guarantee a minimum standard of living after retirement. In general minimum contributory pensions that are only made available after the normal retirement age have little (but size- able) incentives effect in at least low incomer workers. Alternatively minimum contributory benefits made available at the early retirement age can generate substantial incentive effects on transitions to retirement of employed and unemployed workers. The importance of this effect critically depends upon both the eligibility conditions and the generosity of the mini- mum pension, that is, in the relationship between the guaranteed minimum pension and the average or the minimum wage.

This work sets out to analyze the motivations adult children may have to provide informal care, considering the monetary transfers they receive from their parents. Traditional motivations, such as altruism and exchange, are matched against more recent social bond theories. Our findings indicate that informal caregivers receive less frequent and less generous transfers than non-caregivers; that is, caregivers are more prone to suppress their self-interested motivations in order to prioritize the well being of another person. Additionally, long-term public care benefits increase both the probability of receiving a transfer and its amount, with this effect being more intense for both the poorest and richest households. Our findings suggest that if long-term care benefits are intended to increase the recipients' welfare and represent a higher fraction of total income for the poorest households, the effectiveness of these long-term care policies may be diluted.

In this work we combine wage data from Social Security working histories and health information available in the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe to explore the link between health, financial incentives and retirement in Spain. Our results show that individuals in worse health quintiles are, indeed, the more responsive to financial incentives as they prove to be less likely to retire when incentives to continue working increase.

In a world in which the welfare state is under pressure, understanding the dynamic effects of money transfers from parents to adult children and their relationship with informal care can be relevant for policy purposes. We use the first two waves of the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to estimate a double-hurdle model for a parental decision to provide financial support for adult children and the amount involved, taking into account the potential endogeneity of informal caregiving. We find that informal caregivers receive less frequent transfers and less generous amounts than non-caregivers. This offers support for the idea of a form of sophisticated altruistic behavior, according to which caregiving costs are outweighed by the parent’s benefits. Regarding public policies, we find that while increased unemployment benefits would not generate any crowding-out effect in parental transfers, a reduction in long-term public care benefits has a negative multiplier effect on parental transfers.

This paper studies price determination in pharmaceutical markets using data for 25 countries, 6 years, and a comprehensive list of products from the MIDAS IMS database. A key finding is that the USA has prices that are not significantly higher than those of countries with similar income levels, especially those that are 'lightly regulated'. More importantly, price differences to the US levels increase for 'branded', world top selling, or innovative products, and decrease, regardless of the level of regulation for mature or widely diffused molecules. Because prices for top selling molecules may be easier to perceive and recollect and more important for companies, they may bias the public discussion about international price differences.

To study the relationship between formal and informal care for the dependent population in a number of European countries.Data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe for 2004 were used and a bivariate probit model was estimated. Unlike other studies, the present analysis includes the institutional features of the various long-term care systems, in addition to the demographic, health and environmental characteristics of the individual receiving care.A significant correlation was found between the two options, which reveals that, conditional on receiving care, there was a preference for the combination of both types of care. The results show the importance of health status and living arrangements for defining the combination of formal and informal care. There were substantial differences in the likelihood of the two types of care among European countries. A notable finding was the importance of informal care in Spain in comparison with other countries.The probability of receiving formal or informal care is higher in countries where families have a legal obligation to look after dependent relatives and where institutionalization rates are higher. This finding should be considered in the design of long-term care policies. Therefore, to control growth of public expenditure and, at the same time, improve caregiver satisfaction, policies that combine distinct formal services should be promoted over the implementation of care allowances.

In this paper we analyze the trends in labor force participation and transitions to benefit programs of older workers in relation to health trends as well as recent Social Security reforms. Our preliminary conclusions are pessimistic regarding the effect of health improvements on the labor market attachment of older workers since we show that despite the large improvements in the mortality rates among older individuals in Spain, the employment rates of individuals older than fifty-five remain lower than the ones observed in the late 1970s. Some caution should remain in our conclusions as the evidence on health trends is inconclusive. Regarding the effect of Social Security reforms, we find that both the 1997 and the 2002 reform decreased the stock into old-age benefits at the cost of an increased share of the participation into disability. Finally, we find that there was a significant increase in the outflow from employment into disability after the 2002 reform.

Act 39/2006, of 14th December, for the Promotion of Personal Autonomy and the Care of Dependent Individuals establishes the basic conditions for the promotion of personal autonomy and the care of the dependent through the creation of the System of Autonomy and Care of Dependent Individuals and constitutes an excellent opportunity to make progress in the development of a health care space. The aim of healthcare integration is to move from a fragmented framework, in which individuals apply for and receive health benefits and care benefits separately, to a new model of shared responsibility. Since the 1980s, several national and regional projects of healthcare cooperation have been developed. However, although substantial efforts have been made in some autonomous regions of Spain, healthcare coordination seems to predominate over integration in the health setting.

This paper analyses the effect of unmet formal care needs on informal care giving hours in Spain using the two waves of the Informal Support Survey (1994, 2004). Testing for double sample selection from formal care receipt and the emergence of unmet needs provides evidence that the omission of either one of these two variables would cause an underestimation of the number of informal care giving hours. After controlling for these two factors the number of care giving hours increases with the degree of dependency and in the case of unmet needs. This growth is even greater when some formal care is received, thus refuting the substitution model. For the same combination of formal care and unmet needs, informal care giving hours increased between 1994 and 2004. Finally, in the model for 2004, the selection term associated with the unmet needs equation is larger than that of the formal care equation, suggesting the existence of inefficiencies in the formal care allocation process.

As the prevalence of smoking has decreased to below 20%, health practitioners interest has shifted towards the prevalence of obesity, and reducing it is one of the major health challenges in decades to come. In this paper we study the impact that the final product of the anti-smoking campaign, that is, smokers quitting the habit, had on average weight in the population. To these ends, we use data from the Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System, a large series of independent representative cross-sectional surveys. We construct a synthetic panel that allows us to control for unobserved heterogeneity and we exploit the exogenous changes in taxes and regulations to instrument the endogenous decision to give up the habit of smoking. Our estimates, are very close to estimates issued in the ’90s by the US Department of Health, and indicate that a 10% decrease in the incidence of smoking leads to an average weight increase of 2.2 to 3 pounds, depending on choice of specification. In addition, we find evidence that the effect overshoots in the short run, although a significant part remains even after two years. However, when we split the sample between men and women, we only find a significant effect for men. Finally, the implicit elasticity of quitting smoking to the probability of becoming obese is calculated at 0.58. This implies that the net benefit from reducing the incidence of smoking by 1% is positive even though the cost to society is $0.6 billions.

After the early 90s crisis, Spain had a long period of prosperity that ended abruptly with the recent global crisis. What many did not realized is that Spain, by following a different growth trajectory than a majority of the EU15 countries, was choosing a wrong detour. In this paper, we argue that the growth path chosen in early 90s lead to a wrong accumulation of human capital and technological skills in order to adopt ICT technologies. The adverse demographic structure (the significant decrease in the size of the young cohorts), the dual composition of the population by educational levels (high share of people with low and high educational attainment, and a very low share of medium attainment) and the huge and rapid increase of female participation rates have been key factors in this process. In particular, and in contrast with a majority of the EU15 countries, dropout rates and computer illiteracy have remain high, favoring growth in low skills low productivity sectors and hurting employment opportunities in knowledge intensive sectors. Moreover, the lack of people with medium educational attainment has also been responsible for a growing mismatch of the high-educated population. The recent crisis has to be viewed as an opportunity to get back to the correct growth track, by reducing incentives to dropout and by favoring skill adjustment. Targeted schooling (to reduce dropout) and training (to increase ICT literacy of medium age and older cohorts) should be priority policies aimed at increasing productivity in the old sectors, creating employment in intensive ICT services sectors and covering the huge gap in professional and technicians in comparison to other EU15 countries. However, some factors that have slowed the adoption of new technologies in the recent past will persist in the coming decade. In particular, the significant decrease of the cohorts of young entrants and the educational path dependencies should continue to act as resilience factors to implement the reforms required to stimulate the change in the growth model. Furthermore, the permanent mismatch of the most abundant university cohorts (those who graduated around the mid-90s), also constitutes a brake on change, given the drastic decline in new graduates in the near future. Thus, policies focused on young second-generation of immigrants and incentives to the entry of skilled immigrants should also be considered.

An important policy issue in recent years concerns the number of people claiming disability benefits for reasons of incapacity for work. We distinguish between ‘work disability’, which may have its roots in economic and social circumstances, and ‘health disability’ which arises from clear diagnosed medical conditions. Although there is a link between work and health disability, economic conditions, and in particular the ‘business cycle’ and variations in the risk of unemployment over time and across localities, may play an important part in explaining both the stock of disability benefit claimants and inflows to and outflow from that stock. We employ a variety of cross-country and country-specific household panel data sets, as well as administrative data, to test whether disability benefit claims rise when unemployment is higher, and also to investigate the impact of unemployment rates on flows on and off the benefit rolls. We find strong evidence that local variations in unemployment have an important explanatory role for disability benefit receipt, with higher total enrolments, lower outflows from rolls and, often, higher inflows into disability rolls in regions and periods of above-average unemployment. Although general subjective measures of self reported disability and longstanding illness are also positively associated with unemployment rates, inclusion of self-reported health measures does not eliminate the statistical relationship between unemployment rates and disability benefit receipt; indeed including general measures of health often strengthens that underlying relationship. Intriguingly, we also find some evidence from the United Kingdom and the United States that the prevalence of self-reported ‘objective’ specific indicators of disability are often pro-cyclical – that is, the incidence of specific forms of disability are pro-cyclical whereas claims for disability benefits given specific health conditions are counter-cyclical. Overall, the analysis suggests that, for a range of countries and data sets, levels of claims for disability benefits are not simply related to changes in the incidence of health disability in the population and are strongly influenced by prevailing economic conditions. We discuss the policy implications of these various findings.

This paper analyses the determinants of observed exits from employment for people aged 45-59 years old in the context of the Spanish labour market in 1981-2006. The main aim of the paper is to identify the effect of the business cycle (BC) on the timing and the type of exit route out of the labour force. We proceed in two stages. In the first stage, we study the determinants of exits from employment to non-employment. In the second, we take into account the fact that there are several competing exit routes (unemployment, disability or inactivity) and estimate a competing risk model to evaluate how important BC conditions are in determining the respective exit probabilities. We make use of the recently released Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales to estimate discrete time hazard regression models. We match this information with a number of variables constructed with macroeconomic data derived from the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica to measure growth and employability performance of different economic sectors and regions in Spain in order to capture the variation in the business cycle between times, sectors and regions. Time-varying covariates are also included in the analysis to model the monetary incentives provided by the system. We find that both BC conditions and a number of special schemes included in the unemployment and disability legislation affect the exit timing and also the choice of the route out of the labour market.

The wave of immigration in Spain in the last 10 years has had major consequences in the provision of key public services. In the present study, we examined the effect of this population shock on the demand for private health insurance.Using data from the National Health Survey for 2001, 2003 and 2006, we estimated discrete choice models to analyze the demand for dual coverage (public and private insurance) and the demand for private coverage among civil servants.The results suggest that both the percentage of immigrants and the increase in the population resulted in greater demand for private health insurance (social security sample), mainly in groups with a middle-to-high income and with children or with a greater choice of private healthcare provider (in the sample of civil servants). In both cases, private healthcare was sought to gain access to specialized and emergency services more rapidly. The marginal effect obtained by using the variable of the percentage of immigrants was much higher in the sample of civil servants (about 0.20) than in the social security sample (0.05).Although immigrants tend to enjoy better health and use health services (with the exception of emergencies) less frequently than Spaniards, this collective has led to a significant increase in the demand for healthcare and, especially, private health insurance.

In this paper we analyze the relationship between the employment of the young, exit of older people and retirement incentives using data from both the Spanish labor force survey and the Muestra Contínua de Vidas Laborales. Against a priori expectations, we do find some (weak) evidence of positive (negative) relationship between the employment (unemployment) of young and the labor force participation of the older population. However, we are unable to find a clear relationship between the employment of the young and the incentives to retirement created by the Spanish pension system. We believe this is so because retirement incentives have changed very little during the last two decades.

This paper studies price determination in pharmaceutical markets using data for 25 countries, six years and a comprehensive list of products from the MIDAS IMS database. A key finding is that the U.S. has prices that are not significantly higher than those of countries with similar income levels, specially those that are "lightly regulated". More importantly, price differences to the US levels increase for "branded" or innovative products, and decrease, regardless of the level of regulation for mature or widely diffused molecules. In addition, the nationality of the producer appears to have a small and often in significant impact on prices. We have constructed a theoretical model that accounts for all these findings simultaneously. One interesting aspect of the model is that it shows that reference pricing confers a degree of protection against government intervention. Thus, there is a sense in which a reference price (or similar) policy in one country becomes a “commitment device to avoid lowering price in another one.

The initial works council’s wage claim and the initial firm’s (counter)offer as well as the fraction of the disputed wages the works council is able to capture conditional on initial disagreement are analyzed on the basis of a Spanish sample of wage settlements. After a given initial wage claim, the system forces the firm either to accept it or to make a counteroffer prior to a fixed (unknown to the econometrician) and short deadline. In this context signaling models predict that the wage claim should try to screen the firm’s level of profitability, while the offer is expected to reveal little information. Both hypotheses are tested using the Spanish data set and neither is rejected. The analysis of the fraction of the disputed wages the workers get after initial disagreement provides further evidence in favour of signalling models since we find it is to both observed and private information as well as to conflicting activity variables. Moreover, conditional on covariates, for a number of sectors, we cannot reject the parties “split the difference” between both initial offers. Note this solution coincides with the Rubinstein’s (1982) wage, the solution for the complete information game.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of multimarket contact on the behavior of pharmaceutical firms controlling for different levels of regulatory constraints using IMS MIDAS database. Theoretically, firms that meet in several markets are expected to be capable of sustaining implicitly more profitable out- comes, even if perfect monitoring is not possible. Firms may find it profitable to redistribute their market power among markets where they are operating. We present evidence for nine OECD countries with different degrees of regulation and show that regulation affects the importance of economic forces on firms' price setting behavior. Furthermore, our results confirms the presence of the predictions of the multimarket theory for more market friendly countries (U.S. and Canada) and less regulated ones (U.K., Germany, Netherlands), in contrast, for highly regulated countries (Japan, France, Italy and Spain) the results are less clear with some countries being consistent with the theory while others contradicting it.

In this paper we explore the effects of the minimum pension program on welfare and retirement in Spain. This is done with a stylized life-cycle model which provides a convenient analytical characterization of optimal behavior. We use data from the Spanish Social Security to estimate the behavioral parameters of the model and then simulate the changes induced by the minimum pension in aggregate retirement patterns. The impact is substantial: there is a threefold increase in retirement at 60 (the age of first entitlement) with respect to the economy without minimum pensions, and total early retirement (before or at 60) is almost 50% larger.

In this paper we estimate equations for deserving or "true disability indicator" and receiv- ing disability benefits to evaluate the award error as the difference between both probabilities using survey data from Spain. As expected award errors are not randomly distributed across the population. We find that individuals aged between 55 and 59, self-employed, working in an agricultural sector or living in a depressed region, have a significantly higher probability of receiving a benefit without deserving than the rest of individuals. We also find evidence of gender discrimination since males have a significantly higher probability of receiving a benefit without deserving it. Finally we show that the probability of getting a benefit being healthy is not distributed at random across the population. We have estimated the cost of wrongful benefit concession at a minimum of 1500 million euros or 0,2 percent of the Spanish GDP for year 2000. All these findings confirm that disability benefits are being used as an instrument for exiting the labor market for individuals approaching the early retirement age. Since the awarding process depends on Social Security Regional offices, this implies that some regional offices are applying loosely the requirements for granting disability benefits.

In this paper we evaluate the quantitative impact that a number of alternative reform scenarios may have on the total expenditure for public pensions in Spain. Our quantitative findings can be summarized in two sentences. For all the reforms considered, the financial impact of the mechanical effect (change in benefits) is order of magnitudes larger than the behavioral impact or change in behavior. For the two Spanish reforms, we find once again that their effect on the outstanding liability of the Spanish Social Security System is essentially negligible: neither the mechanical nor the behavioral effects amount to much for the 1997 reform, and amount to very little for the 2002 amendment.

Using three waves of data from the European Community Household Panel, this paper estimates demand for physician services equations for 12 European countries. We focus on the selection of the most appropriate econometric specification for visits to general practitioners and to specialists among two-part and latent class models. The distinction between the demand of services from these two types of physicians allows us to distinguish cases in which two-part perform better than latent class models, evidence which is different from previous findings in the literature. The results suggest that latent class models are more appropriate than two-part models to estimate general practitioners utilisation while the opposite is found for visits to the specialists.

An endogenous switching model of ex-ante wage changes under indexed and non-indexed settlements is estimated for the Spanish manufacturing sector using collective bargaining firm data for the 1984-1991 period. The likelihood of indexing the settlement is higher for nationwide unions than for other union groups within the works council and increases with the expected level of inflation. For wage change equations, a common structure for indexed and non-indexed settlements is strongly rejected, showing a source of nominal rigidity. For indexed contracts, the expected ex-ante total inflation coverage is nearly complete. It is also shown that workers pay a significant ex-ante wage change premium (differential) to obtain a cost of living allowance clause. However, the realised contingent compensation exceeds such a premium for all industries. Finally, important spillover effects in wage setting and the decision to index the settlement have been detected.

In this work we analyze the role of financial incentives to retire on the individual propensity to retire on a sample of Spanish Working histories from the Social Security administration. The results obtained are used to simulate the impact of various reform, including the 1997 Spanish reform on the average retirement age. Comparing the results of the reforms, only is partially effective that which suggest a delay of three years in the early and normal retirement ages. The results of the 1997 are negligible.