BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

Oil price showed sharp fluctuations in recent years which revived the interest in its effect on inflation. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between oil price and inflation in Spain, at national and regional levels, and making the distinction between energy and non-energy inflation. To this end, we fit econometric models to measure the effect of oil price shocks on inflation and to predict them under different scenarios. Our results show that almost half of the volatility of changes in total inflation is explained by changes in oil price. As could be expected, the energy component of inflation drives this effect. We also find that, under the most likely scenarios, 1-year ahead total inflation will be moderate, with relevant differences across regions., This research was supported by Instituto Complutense de Analisis Economico (ICAE), as well as Universidad Complutense de Madrid/Banco de Santander through grants PR26/16-20270, 0412155 and a CT17/17-CT18/17 FPI scholarship. César Castro acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (Project DGCT, No. PGC2018-093542-B-I00). Andrés Barge-Gil acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Project ECO2017-82445-R).

The continued spread of COVID-19 suggests a significant possibility of reimposing the lockdowns and stricter social distancing similar to the early phase of pandemic control. We present a dynamic model to quantify the impact of isolation for the contagion curves. The model is calibrated to the COVID-19 outbreak in Spain to study the effects of the isolation enforcement following the declaration of the state of alarm (14 March 2020). The simulations indicate that both the timing and the intensity of the isolation enforcement are crucial for the COVID-19 spread. For example, a 4-day earlier intervention for social distancing would have reduced the number of COVID-19 infected people by 67%. The model also informs us that the isolation enforcement does not delay the peak day of the epidemic but slows down its end. When relaxing social distancing, a reduction of the contagion probability (with the generalization of preventive actions, such as face mask wearing and hands sanitizing) is needed to overcome the effect of a rise in the number of interpersonal encounters. We report a threshold level for the contagion pace to avoid a second COVID-19 outbreak in Spain., Casares acknowledges the support of Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, Spanish Government (PGC2018-09354), and Khan acknowledges the support of Carleton University Rapid COVID-19 Research Grant 112940.

We provide evidence that both firm and establishment entry rates in the US have been increasing over the past decade, seemingly ending the secular decline observed over previous decades. However, the job-size of new businesses relative to incumbents has decreased substantially. Controlling for these opposite trends reveals that the size-adjusted entry rate continues to decline., Miguel Casares would like to thank the Spanish government (research project PGC2018-093542-B-I00) for the financial support.

We consider the problem of cleaning a transboundary river, proposed by Ni and Wang (Games Econ Behav 60:176–186, 2007). A river is modeled as a segment divided into subsegments, each occupied by one region, from upstream to downstream. The waste is transferred from one region to the next at some rate. Since this transfer rate may be unknown, the social planner could have uncertainty over each region’s responsibility. Two natural candidates to distribute the costs in this setting would be the method that assigns to each region its expected responsibility and the one that assigns to each region its median responsibility. We show that the latter is equivalent to the Upstream Responsibility method (Alcalde-Unzu et al. in Games Econ Behav 90:134–150, 2015) and the former is a new method that we call Expected Responsibility. We compare both solutions and analyze them in terms of a new property of monotonicity., Jorge Alcalde-Unzu acknowledges the financial support from the Spanish Government through projects PGC2018-093542-B-I00 and ECO2017-91589-EXP. María Gómez-Rúa acknowledges the financial support from the Spanish Government through projects ECO2014-52616-R and ECO2017-82241-R and the Galician Government through projects GRC 2015/014 and ED431B 2019/34. Elena Molis acknowledges the financial support from the Spanish Government through projects ECO2015-67519-P and PID2019-110783GB-I00, the Basque Government through project IT-568-13 and the Andalusian Government through the projects SEJ1436 and SEJ492.

Taking advantage of a card-scanning system that records individual, real-time data on
the use of bio-waste sorting bins, we run a randomized field experiment to analyze the effectiveness of soft commitments in promoting participation in waste sorting. Being given
the offer to sign a soft commitment increased participation in waste sorting by 7-8 percentage points (0.22 s.d.). This represents a 23-28% increase relative to the control group
of households that participated in the study but were not given the opportunity to sign a
soft commitment. This positive effect of the soft commitment operates exclusively through
the extensive margin (households start to sort their waste); it does not affect the intensive
margin (household adherence to waste sorting). This implies that soft commitments can
improve the effectiveness of environmental campaigns in cities or areas where a large part of
the population has never participated in waste sorting, while they would have little impact
in places where a majority of households have already participated in recycling. We also
show that the positive effect of the soft commitment remains constant 35 weeks after being
offered. The effect also persists after 36-47 weeks, although its size is reduced by one half., Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PGC2018-093542-B-I00)

Interconnected autonomous teams (IAT) reflect a human resources policy of organizing employees into a network of autonomous teams and allowing individuals to work on more than one of those teams. This paper studies how such a policy influences the productivity effects of profit sharing (PS). We first argue that the presence of IAT could mitigate the 'free rider' problem in each team of the network. Next, using the European Working Conditions Survey, we document a positive relationship between employee productivity and the interaction between PS and IAT. We interpret this result as a confirmation that IAT might indeed alleviate the 'free rider' problem associated with profit sharing schemes., Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (R&D projects ECO 2017-86305-C4-2-R and PGC2018–093542–B–I00)

This paper examines how the pollution generated by oil operations in Nigeria can affect agricultural total factor productivity. I analyze oil spills, which are the main ecological disaster in Nigeria and lead to major environmental, economic, and social problems. Following a consumer-producer household framework, and applying a difference-and-difference approach, I estimate an agricultural production function. I find that farmers located less than 10 kilometers from oil spills suffer a relative reduction in agricultural output of around 2.73%. I also examine alternative mechanisms and find that oil-spill pollution can explain my results. I detect less owner-occupied land and a drop in labor income in urban areas close to oil spills, which could also be explained by a decrease in the labor productivity component. This study highlights an externality through which the oil industry affects living conditions in rural areas and stresses the importance of clean-up in areas close to oil spills., This research has benefited from the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Project PGC2018-093542-B-I00).

We provide evidence that both firm and establishment entry rates in the US have been increasing over the past decade, seemingly ending the decline observed over previous decades. However, neither the job creation and destruction rates nor the reallocation rates show signs of recovery. These conflicting features are reconciled after we control for the changes in job size of business units. As a result, we conclude that business dynamism flattened at historically low levels during the 2010s., Miguel Casares would like to thank the Spanish government (research project PGC2018-093542-B-I00 ) for the financial support.

We consider truncated (or conditional) sum-of-squares estimation of a parametric fractional time series model with an additive deterministic structure. The latter consists of both a drift term and a generalized power law trend. The memory parameter of the stochastic component and the power parameter of the deterministic trend component are both considered unknown real numbers to be estimated and belonging to arbitrarily large compact sets. Thus, our model captures different forms of nonstationarity and noninvertibility as well as a very flexible deterministic specification. As in related settings, the proof of consistency (which is a prerequisite for proving asymptotic normality) is challenging due to non-uniform convergence of the objective function over a large admissible parameter space and due to the competition between stochastic and deterministic components. As expected, parameter estimates related to the deterministic component are shown to be consistent and asymptotically normal only for parts of the parameter space depending on the relative strength of the stochastic and deterministic components. In contrast, we establish consistency and asymptotic normality of parameter estimates related to the stochastic component for the entire parameter space. Furthermore, the asymptotic distribution of the latter estimates is unaffected by the presence of the deterministic component, even when this is not consistently estimable. We also include Monte Carlo simulations to illustrate our results., J. Hualde's research is supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación through project PGC2018-093542-B-I00.

We address the problem of assessing the value of a language. We consider a stylized model of multilingual societies in which we introduce axioms formalizing the principles of impartiality, monotonicity, invariance and consistency. We show that the combination of these axioms characterizes a family of communicative benefit functions which assign a value to each language in the society. The functions within the family involve a two-step procedure. First, they identify the groups of agents that can communicate in each language. Second, each group is assigned an aggregate (size-dependent) value, which is evenly divided among the languages in which the group can communicate. Our novel approach could be useful in a wide range of empirical applications and policy decisions., The first author acknowledges the financial support from the Spanish Government through grant PGC2018-093542-B-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by 'ERDF A way of making Europe'. The second author acknowledges the Spanish Government through grant PID2020-115011GB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. Funding for publishing: Universidad Pablo de Olavide/CBUA.