BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

We empirically investigate how the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) changes when gaining access to market information. To do so, we evaluate the impact of an information program diffused by a bank among its SME customers. Adopting firms gained access to reports with rich information about their own clientele and that of nearby establishments. While we find that adoption is associated with a 4.5% revenue increase, our instrumental variable results indicate that adoption increases revenue by 9%. The main mechanism driving our result is that the new information prompted adopting establishments to target gender-age customer groups underserved before adoption., We also thank Fundación BBVA for funding this research project. Jose Enrique Galdon-Sanchez also thanks the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades (projects DGCT; PID2021-127119NB-I00 and PID2022-138774NB-I00) for financial support.

This paper proposes a novel test for the hypothesis of economic convergence. We extend the standard definition of convergence based on the parity condition and say that two economies converge if the time series of economic output are positively cointegrated and cotrended. With this definition in place, our main contribution is to propose a test of positive cointegration that does not require estimation of the cointegrating relationship, but is able to differentiate between positive and negative cointegration. Once the possibility of positive cointegration is established in a first stage, we test for cotrending in a second stage. Our sequential proposal enjoys an excellent performance in small samples due to the fast convergence of our novel test statistic under positive cointegration. This is illustrated in a simulation exercise where we report clear evidence showing the outperformance of our proposed method compared to existing methods in the related literature that test for economic convergence using cointegration methods. The results are particularly strong for sample sizes between 25 and 50 observations. The empirical application testing for economic convergence between the G7 group of countries over the period 1990–2022 confirms these findings., Javier Hualde acknowledges financial support from Grant PID2021-127119NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by 'ERDF A way of making Europe'. Jose Olmo acknowledges financial support from Grant PID2023-147798NB-I00 and Fundación Agencia Aragonesa para la Investigación y el Desarrollo (ARAID). Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.

Agents may form coalitions. Each coalition shares its endowment among its agents by applying a sharing rule. The sharing rule induces a coalition formation problem by assuming that agents rank coalitions according to the allocation they obtain in the corresponding sharing problem. We characterize the sharing rules that induce a class of stable coalition formation problems as those that satisfy a natural axiom that formalizes the principle of solidarity. Thus, solidarity becomes a sufficient condition to achieve stability., Jorge Alcalde-Unzu and Oihane Gallo acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Government through grant PID2021-127119NBI00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ‘‘ERDF A way of making Europe’’. Jorge Alcalde-Unzu acknowledges the financial support from
Universidad Pública de Navarra through grant PJUPNA2023-11403. Oihane Gallo acknowledges the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through Project
100018_192583 as the main financial support. Oihane Gallo and Elena Inarra aknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Government through grant
PID2019-107539GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ‘‘ERDF A way of making Europe’’. Elena Inarra acknowledges financial support
from the Basque Government through grant IT1697-22. Juan D. Moreno-Ternero acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Government through grant
PID2020-115011GB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

This paper investigates the reaction of real stock returns and their volatility in the three main euro area economies (France, Germany and Italy), the U.K. and the U.S. to oil price changes caused by different shocks in the supply-side and demand-side of the global crude oil market, including the shock on the demand for oil inventories. Our findings suggest that the impact of oil supply and aggregate demand shocks on real stock returns and volatility are not altered when oil inventories are explicitly considered in the modeling of global crude oil market. However, the effects of oil-specific demand shocks on real stock returns are modified by the inclusion of oil inventories in the model, stressing the importance of the uncertainty channel in the link between the oil and stock markets. Finally, oil inventory shocks have a negative impact at medium time horizons on real stock returns, as the surge in the price of oil causes depletion of inventories., The authors acknowledge the financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación through research projects PID2021-127119NB-I00 and PID2022-143170OB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/ 501100011033/FEDER, UE.

This paper serves as the opening for the Virtual Special Issue on the economic consequences of gender differences in behavior, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology. The issue aims to consolidate recent research exploring how gender differences in behavior, reflected in risk attitudes, competitiveness, and negotiation tendencies, impact economic outcomes and, in particular, may partially explain labor market differences across genders regarding occupational segregation, wage gaps, and disparities in career advancement. We provide an overview of the topic, highlighting the importance of understanding gender-specific economic behaviors and setting the stage for the detailed studies, and follow by introducing the articles included in the special issue, which use mainly experimental and empirical insights., Jaume García-Segarra acknowledges financial support from project PID2022-136977NB-I00 Funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/, Spain and PCI2024-155035-2 funded by MCIN/AEI, Spain and the DFG, Germany. Iñigo Hernandez-Arenaz acknowledges the financial support from grants PID2021-127119NB-I00 and PID2022-138774NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, Spain and by “ERDF A way of making europe”. Pedro Rey-Biel acknowledges funding from Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Spain (PID2022-142172NB-I00) ICREA Academia and Universitat Ramón Llull.

The Covid 19 pandemic has caused both a decrease in tax revenues and an increase in public spending, forcing governments to increase fiscal deficits to unprecedented levels. Given these circumstances, it is foreseeable that fiscal rules will play a predominant role in the design of many countries¿ recovery policies. We develop a general equilibrium, overlapping generations model for a small, open economy in order to study the impact of several fiscal rules upon welfare, public expenditures and growth. We calibrate the model to the Peruvian economy. In this economy, fiscal rules have been widely used and, unlike in other Latin American countries, they have been relatively successful. We find that fiscal rules will generate better results in terms of output if, in addition to maintaining control over the fiscal result, they also preserve public investment. We also find that the performance of economies that implement structural rules tends to be better than the performance of economies that implement rules based on realized budget balance., Jose E. Galdon-Sanchez acknowledges financial support from Spanish State Research Agency through project PID2021-127119NB-I00 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”. Julián Díaz-Saavedra acknowledges financial support from the Spanish State Research Agency through project PID2019-110783GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. Open access funding provided by Universidad Pública de Navarra.

Focusing on Spain between 1900 and 1930, a period characterised by significant structural transformations and rapid economic growth, this article shows that the sex ratio at birth (SRB) was abnormally high, at least until the 1920s. Apart from questioning whether female under-registration and different mortality environments alone can explain the results reported here, our analysis of regional information indicates that SRBs were higher in provinces where the economic structure was dominated by agriculture and manufacturing (relative to the service sector). In addition, exploiting the annual variation in low-skilled wages at the province level makes it possible to distinguish between the roles played by under-registration and outright neglect: while higher wages could increase the opportunity cost of registering a female birth (and therefore result in higher SRBs), they could also reduce the pressure to neglect female babies (and therefore result in lower SRBs). We find evidence of both effects (income and opportunity cost) of wages on SRBs between 1914 and 1920 in Spain, a period in which WWI arguably subjected the Spanish economy to an exogenous demand shock. These two effects, however, imply very different discriminatory practices. In fact, on average, the income effect was larger than the effect arising from the opportunity cost, which supports the idea that female neglect around birth was more prevalent than previously assumed during the early twentieth century in Spain. As expected, the relationship between wages and the SRB vanished during the 1920s, along with the unbalanced SRB. These results stress that gender discrimination around birth does not necessarily disappear with economic growth unless this process is accompanied by expanded labour opportunities for women., Open Access funding provided by Universidad Pública de Navarra. Rebeca Echavarri also acknowledges financial support from the grant PID2020-115183RB-C21 & PID2021-127119NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI//10.13039/501100 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”. Francisco Beltran Tapia acknowledges financial support from the Research Council of Norway (Project 301527).

This study examined the recent inflation episode in the US using an estimated NK-DSGE model with endogenous unemployment fluctuations. We find that the US price inflation accelerated due to a sudden wage increase during the COVID-19 lockdown, the 2021 expansionary monetary policy, and price-push shocks in the quarters of a global surge in energy costs. The disinflation path predicts that further indexing prices or wages to lagged inflation will lead to higher wage inflation and slower price disinflation. Moreover, severely tightening the Fed's monetary policy will only slightly reduce inflation but increase unemployment., This work is supported by the Spanish government (research projects PID2021-127119NB-I00 and PID2020-118698GB-I00 from Ministerio de Innovación, Ciencia y Universidades). Open access funding provided by Universidad Pública de Navarra.

This paper examines the relationship between kin-based institutions and quality of government in the regions of Spain, France, and Italy. The results show that the rate of cousin marriage during the twentieth century is a strong predictor of the modern-day quality of government in the regions of these three countries. Regions characterized by a higher prevalence of cousin marriage tend to have on average worse governance outcomes. This finding holds after accounting for country fixed effects and different variables that may be correlated with both consanguinity and regional quality of government, including an extensive array of geographical, historical, and contemporary factors. The observed association between cousin marriage and quality of government persists when I utilize an instrumental variable approach that exploits regional variation in the degree of historical exposure to the marriage laws of the medieval Catholic Church to address potential endogeneity concerns. Furthermore, the paper also provides evidence consistent with the idea that the effect of cousin marriage on the quality of government operates through its impact on a series of cultural traits such as impersonal trust, fairness, and conformity-obedience., Open Access funding provided by Universidad Pública de Navarra. Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Grant/Award Number: Project PID2021-127119NB-I00.

The theoretical literature on public school choice proposes centralized mechanisms that assign children to schools on the basis of parents’ preferences and the priorities children have for different schools. The related experimental literature analyzes in detail how various mechanisms fare in terms of welfare and stability of the resulting matchings, yet often provides only aggregate statistics of the individual behavior that leads to these outcomes (i.e., the degree to which subjects tell the truth in the induced simultaneous move game). In this paper, we show that the quantal response equilibrium (QRE) adequately describes individual behavior and the resulting matching in three constrained problems for which the immediate acceptance mechanism and the student-optimal stable mechanism coincide. Specifically, the comparative statics of the logit-QRE with risk-neutral and expected-payoff-maximizing agents capture the directional changes of subject behavior and the prevalence of the different stable matchings when cardinal payoffs (i.e., relative preference intensities) are modified in the experiment., Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from Fundación Ramón Areces. J. Alcalde-Unzu gratefully acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PGC2018-093542-B-I00 and PID2021-127119NB-I00). F. Klijn gratefully acknowledges financial support from AGAUR–Generalitat de Catalunya (2017-SGR-1359 and 2021-SGR-00416) and the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) through grants ECO2017-88130-P and PID2020-114251GB-I00 and the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (Barcelona School of Economics CEX2019-000915-S). M. Vorsatz gratefully acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PGC2018-096977-B-I00 and PID2021-122919NB-I00).

A significant portion of female neonatal, infant and child mortality could be avoided. These girls form part of the phenomenon known as missing women. Previous literature has examined whether families that prevent unwanted (female) pregnancies from reaching term provide greater care to the surviving daughters, but it reports mixed results. An avenue that has received limited attention is the possibility that explicit discrimination against girls legitimates otherwise non-realized behaviors, leading to additional fatal neglect. This paper contributes to the literature, going a step further in the causal identification of aggregate prenatal discrimination effects on postnatal discrimination by comparing the survival outcomes of brothers and sisters who were exposed to different levels of prenatal discrimination around the time of their births. The sample of siblings is reconstructed from the birth history of women in the Indian National Family Health Survey (2016-2017). Prenatal discrimination is measured by the male to female sex ratio at birth (SRB), computed by backward induction from the Census of India (2011). Results show that the greater the difference between the SRB in the birthyears of sisters and the SRB in the birthyears of brothers, the greater the difference in mortality between sisters and brothers. This finding lends support to the idea that prenatal discrimination legitimized otherwise latent discrimination. Furthermore, the excess female mortality associated with this mechanism is found in rural areas, but not in urban ones, and this relationship is more intense for infant girls born in high parities and therefore more likely to belong to families that did not resort to sex-selective abortions to control family sex-composition. This paper contributes to the problematization of the intertwining dimensions of discrimination, providing a better understanding of the missing women phenomenon., Open Access funding provided by Universidad Pública de Navarra thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer
Nature. Rebeca Echavarri acknowledges financial support from the Grant PID2020-115183RB-C21 and PID2021-127119NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI//https://doi.org/10.13039/501100 and by "ERDF A way of making Europe".

This paper examines the relationship between kin-based institutions and state capacity. The results show that the intensity of kinship networks is a strong predictor of present-day state capacity, both across and within countries. Societies historically characterized by more intensive kinship systems tend to have weaker states today. This finding holds after accounting for various variables that may be correlated with both kinship network intensity and state capacity, including a broad range of geographic, historical, and contemporary factors. The results are also robust when employing an instrumental variable approach that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in historical exposure to the marriage laws of the medieval Catholic Church. Additionally, the analysis reveals that societies with intensive kin-based institutions typically exhibit lower political centralization. Given the essential role of political centralization in establishing state capacity, this finding helps explain the negative association between kinship intensity and state capacity., The author would like to thank the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Project PID2021-127119NB-I00) for funding the research, as well as the Public University of Navarre for providing Open Access funding.

Through a field study (N = 1,519) that uses a technology to record real-time data on waste sorting, we find that offering the opportunity to sign a pledge increases the effectiveness of an environmental campaign. With a timespan of over four years, the pledge increased waste sorting participation by 4.55 to 5.10 percentage points (SD = 0.1997). The effect is greater immediately after the campaign (around 9 to 10 pp during the first 15 wk), but it remains sizable and statistically significant 150 to 210 wk after signing (3.11 to 4.45 pp).
Continue Reading, Financial support from Grant TED2021-129798A-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR. I.H.-A. acknowledges the financial support from Grant PID2021-127119NB-I00 and PID2022-138774NBI00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ¿ERDF A way of making Europe.¿ E.A.-P. thanks Grant PID2020-115018RB-C33 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

Today, several social movements in western democracies argue that traditional representative democracy has failed to adequately represent the will of the 'people', and instead support direct democracy as the only political system to restore the will of the majority. We analyze under what conditions the policy - a vector of decisions on every issue - implemented by the winner of a bipartisan electoral competition coincides with the policy that citizens would choose by means of direct democracy. We find necessary and sufficient conditions for this equivalence to hold, implying that, as long as at least one of them is not fulfilled, a divergence of outcomes between direct and representative democracy arises. The first condition requires that the outcome of majority voting issue-by-issue is the Condorcet winner relative to the voters' preference profile over the set of policies. The second requires that either that outcome is the preferred policy for at least one of the candidates, or that candidates¿ preferred policies differ on every single issue. We reinterpret some findings in the literature in the light of our model and present them as potential reasons why the equivalence between direct and representative democracy may fail., Funding text 1: Financial support through the Grant PID2020-114309GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, the Grant PID2 021-127119NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by \u201CERDF A way of making Europe\u201D, and the Grant PJUPNA2023-11403 funded by Universidad Pública de Navarra is gratefully acknowledged. Open access funding provided by Universidad Pública de Navarra.; Funding text 2: Financial support through the Grant PID2020-114309GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 , the Grant PID2021-127119NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI / 10.13039/501100011033 and by \u201C ERDF A way of making Europe \u201D, and the Grant PJUPNA2023-11403 funded by Universidad Pública de Navarra is gratefully acknowledged.

We analyze the problem of locating a public facility in a domain of single-peaked and single-dipped preferences when the social planner knows the type of preference (single-peaked or single-dipped) of each agent. Our main result characterizes all strategy-proof rules and shows that they can be decomposed into two steps. In the first step, the agents with single-peaked preferences are asked about their peaks and, for each profile of reported peaks, at most two alternatives are preselected. In the second step, the agents with single-dipped preferences are asked to reveal their dips to complete the decision between the preselected alternatives. Our result generalizes the findings of Moulin (1980) and Barberà and Jackson (1994) for single-peaked and of Manjunath (2014) for single-dipped preferences. Finally, we show that all strategy-proof rules are also group strategy-proof and analyze the implications of Pareto efficiency., Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through project PID2021-127119NB-I00 (funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by "ERDF A way of making Europe"); Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through project 100018_192583, and additional support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through projects PID2021-127119NB-I00 and PID2019-107539GB-I00 (funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”).

This paper examines the impact of ultraviolet radiation (UV-R) on state capacity. The results indicate that the intensity of UV-R is a strong predictor of cross-country differences in state capacity. Countries with a higher degree of UV-R exposure tend on average to have weaker states. This finding remains unaffected after controlling for different variables that may be correlated with both UV-R and state capacity, including an extensive set of geographical, historical and contemporary factors. The observed link between sunlight and state capacity is not driven by potential outliers and is robust to the employment of alternative measures of state capacity, estimation methods and other sensitivity checks. Furthermore, the analysis also reveals that the individualistic-collectivist dimension of culture acts as a transmission channel connecting UV-R and state capacity. The estimates show that a lower degree of UV-R exposure leads to the adoption of individualistic values, which in turn contribute to the development of state capacity., Open access funding provided by Public University of Navarre.

Direct public funding to political parties exists in most OECD countries and its allocation is executed on the basis of two principles: (i) proportional to the votes (or alternatively the number of seats), and (ii) equal distribution. We consider a situation in which there are two scenarios and two policies, where the optimal policy for each scenario is different. We study which policy is implemented when public political funding is introduced and voters are uncertain about the realized scenario. First, when the goal is to implement the optimal policy, we find that direct public funding to political parties is necessary if voters are more likely to be right than wrong about the scenario. Second, we characterize all equilibria based on voters' beliefs, the amount of money proportionally allocated, and the parties' preferences over the pairs scenario-policy and being in office., G. Correa-Lopera and B. Moreno acknowledge the Grant PID2020-114309GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. G. Correa-Lopera also thanks the Grant PID2021-127119NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by 'CERDF A way of making Europe', and the Grant PJUPNA2023-11403 funded by Universidad Pública de Navarra.
Open Access funding provided by Universidad Pública de Navarra.

The recent inflation episode has been examined in an estimated NK-DSGE model with sticky wages and unemployement. The rise of US price inflation resulted from a combination of a sudden rise in 2020, the expansionary monetary policy in 2021 and price-push shocks in the quarters of a global rising on the cost of energy. The projections of the disinflation path indicate that if either prices or wages are further indexed to lagged inflation, wage inflation will be higher and the price disinflation will slow down. Also, a severe tightening of Fed's monetary policy will barely reduce inflation at the cost of higher unemployment., Authors acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (research project PID2021-127119NB-I00)

A laboratory study was carried out to analyze the relationship between ambiguity
regarding the sharing norms in structured alternating-ofer bargaining and gender
diferences in bargaining. Symmetric environments, where a 50:50 split emerges
as the unique sensible norm, showed the lowest ambiguity and gender diferences
are absent. We increased ambiguity by introducing asymmetries into the bargaining
environment by making one bargaining party get a higher share than the other (due
to empowerment, entitlement or informational asymmetries), but without imposing
new sharing norms. In these situations, men are less likely to reach an agreement,
but, when they do, they obtain a larger share of the pie. As a result, men and women
show similar overall earnings but earnings are lower when bargaining with men. We
fnd suggestive evidence that gender diferences diminish when we reduce ambiguity regarding the sharing norms by providing information about other participants’
agreements in asymmetric environments., Iñigo HernandezArenaz acknowledges the fnancial support provided by Vicerrectorado de Investigación de la UPV/ EHU (PIF//13/015), Departamento de Educación, Política Lingüística y Cultura del Gobierno Vasco (IT869-13), Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PID2019-108343GA-I00), and Grant PID2021-127119NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”. Nagore Iriberri acknowledges the fnancial support from Grant PID2019-106146GB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, Departamento de Educación and Política Lingüística y Cultura del Gobierno Vasco (IT1697-22), and the Norwegian Research Council (TOPPFORSK 250506). Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.

The sex ratio at birth (SRB) in Spain jumped abruptly in the late 1970s and temporarily reached values of more than 109 boys per 100 girls in the early 1980s. This article shows that health care system expansion increased the likelihood of male births in Spain between 1975 and 1995. By facilitating the delivery of preterm and dystocic babies and improving overall maternal conditions, these developments increased the survival chances of male fetuses, who are biologically weaker than females. However, biological factors alone cannot explain the biased SRB. Our analysis shows that the availability of prenatal sex determination technologies and a strong son preference nurtured by the Francoist dictatorship fostered gender-biased behaviors that resulted in an excessively high SRB. The lack of evidence on sex-specific abortions suggests that women took better care of themselves when carrying a son. The spread of gender-egalitarian values brought about by the end of the dictatorship and the transition to democracy undermined son preference and returned the SRB to normal levels., Rebeca Echavarri acknowledges financial support from grants PID2020-115183RB-C21 and PID2021-127119NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI//10.13039/501100 and by 'ERDF A way of making Europe'. Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia acknowledges financial support from the Research Council of Norway (Project 301527).

There are two opposing welfare effects of market power in a model with monopolistic competition, loan defaults and moral hazard. The loss of output produced if firms set a higher mark-up over marginal costs confronts with some gain due to higher expected profits and the reduction of defaults. Such tradeoff results in an optimal level of market power that decreases with the efficiency of liquidation following default on a loan. If moral hazard is pervasive, credit rationing cuts down the default rates and mitigates the welfare cost of financial frictions., The authors thank Banco de España for financial support through the project. Política monetaria en economías con fricciones financieras y bancarias. Miguel Casares and Jose E. Galdon-Sanchez also acknowledge financial support from Spanish State Research Agency through project PID2021-127119NB-I00 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”. Luca G. Deidda also acknowledges the financial support by the Italian Ministero dell’Università (Grant No. 20157NH5TP), Fondazione di Sardegna, Università di Sassari (Una tantum 2019), and RAS (Grant No. RASSR89213).