Research

Publications


featured in: Science and  5centims.cat 


      watch an interview by Vox Webcasts - CEPR


      featured in: Barcelona GSE Research Focus


      featured in:  Probable Causation,  Nada es Gratis

 

Working Papers


"Historical Family Types and Female Political Representation: Persistence and Change", with Aina Gallego and Dídac Queralt. Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Politics

We argue that different historical family configurations shaped the gendered division of labor within the household, gender norms, and female political representation in the long run. Our main evidence draws from geographic variation in historical family types in Spain and municipality-level electoral data from 1978 to 2015 and earlier democratic spells. We find that areas where the stem family was prevalent—meaning that multiple generations of women lived together and shared domestic work—show higher female political representation than areas with nuclear-family tradition. Still, history is not destiny, and the impact of historical legacies can fade. In our mechanisms analyses, we demonstrate that the introduction of party-list gender quotas balanced off the main effect, although they did not erase underlying differences between regions in gender attitudes and female paid employment. Our research contributes to the study of historical persistence by assessing what institutions can and cannot do to combat patriarchal prejudice. 


"Long-Lasting Social Capital and its Impact on Economic Development: The Legacy of the Commons", with Daniel Montolio, Reject & Resubmit at the Journal of Economic Growth

featured in: Nada es Gratis

This paper analyzes the historical determinants and the long-term persistence of social capital, as well as its effect on economic development, by looking at the legacy of the commons in a Spanish region. In medieval times, common goods were granted to townships and managed collectively by local citizens. This enabled the establishment of institutions for collective action and self-government. Common goods persisted until the second half of the nineteenth century. We argue that the experience of cooperation among villagers, repeated over the centuries, increased the social capital in each local community. In 1845, a law forced small villages to merge with other, a fact which generated exogenous variation in the number of mergers (i.e., cooperative networks) that each modern municipality was required to have. We exploit this change in an IV and RD setting and find that municipalities formed by a greater number of villages have a denser network of associations. We also find that higher social capital is associated with more economic development. 


"The Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War", with Felipe Valencia. CEPR Working Paper DP15091

featured in: Nada es Gratis, Conversación sobre la Historia, Derecho Mercantil, Almacén de Derecho and Segona Volta

The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was one of the most devastating conflicts of the twentieth century, yet little is known about its long-term legacy. We show that the war had a long-lasting effect on social capital, voting behavior and collective memory. To this end we use geo-located data on historical mass graves, disaggregated modern-day survey data on trust, combined with modern electoral results. For econometric identification, we exploit deviations from the initial military plans of attack, using the historical (1931) highway network. We also employ a geographical Regression Discontinuity Design along the Aragon Front. Our results show a significant, negative and sizable relationship between political violence and generalized trust. We further scrutinize the trust results, finding negative effects of conflict on trust in institutions associated with the Civil War, but no effects when looking at trust on Post 1975 democratic institutions. We also find long-lasting results on voting during the Democratic Period (1977-2016), corresponding to the sided political repression implemented in the Aragon region. In terms of mechanisms—using a specialized survey on the Civil War, street names data and Francoist newsreels about the war—we find lower levels of political engagement and differential patterns of collective memory about this traumatic historical event. 


"Estimation of Price-Elasticities of Pharmaceutical Consumption for the Elderly" (with Jaume Puig-Junoy and Marcos Vera-Hernández)

This paper estimates the price-elasticity of prescription drugs exploiting three unique features of the Spanish health system: (1) the co-payment of prescription drug drops from 40% (10% for chronic diseases drugs) to 0% upon retirement, while the co-payment for the rest of health care services remains constant; (2) retirement jumps discontinuously at age 65, the legal retirement age, which allows us to use a regression discontinuity design to disentangle price from selection effects; and (3) absence of deductibles or caps in yearly or monthly out-of-pockey expenditure which simplifies the computation of elasticities. We use administrative data from all individuals aged 63-67 covered by the National Health System in Catalonia (Spain) from 2004-06. We find that the price-elasticity of prescription drugs is -0.20 for non-chronic condition drugs, and -0.08 or -0.03 for chronic condition drugs. Given the size of our estimates, they remain informative even if we interpret them as being possibly biased away from zero (for reasons discussed in the paper). We also find a small increase in the expenditure on medically inappropriate drugs due to the decrease in co-payments. 


Work in Progress


"Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction", with Eleonora Guarnieri