We estimate a 400% wage premium for football players transferring from top European leagues to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2023 compared to those with similar observable characteristics transferring to different clubs within the same leagues. The results are robust to using propensity score matching and other specifications addressing endogeneity. Our analysis does not find evidence for culture driving the premium. Instead, it may be driven by several disamenities, including reputation concerns over Saudi Arabia's human rights record, lower-quality competition, and reduced global media exposure.
Blog entries about the paper:
"La prima salarial saudí a las estrellas del fútbol," post in Nada es Gratis
Based on an extensive survey of the members of the American Economic Association, this paper compares consensus among economists on several economic propositions over four decades. The main result is an increased consensus on many economic propositions, specifically the appropriate role of fiscal policy in macroeconomics and income distribution issues. Economists now embrace the role of fiscal policy in a way not apparent in previous surveys and are largely supportive of government policies that mitigate income inequality. Another area of consensus is the concern with climate change and the use of appropriate policy tools to address it.
Echo in the media:
The Economist: "Economists are agreeing with each other more" (January 8, 2022, pdf available here)
Marginal Revolution: "The new consensus of economists is further to the left" (January 1, 2022)
This article analyses the integration of economic history into economics using a unique dataset containing 11,143 articles written by 919 economic historians and published between 1980 and 2019 in leading journals; we also analysed the authors’ biographical information. Using a probit regression, we find that since 1980, economic historians have increased their likelihood of publishing in Economics or Finance Journals (EFJs) by 12 points. This integration is more marked in North America than in Europe because North American economic historians are more likely to be trained in the discipline of economics. In contrast, a significant share of scholars in Europe are trained in the discipline of economic history. Network visualisations confirm these regional differences: citations to EFJs are much more central in North American scholars’ work. Our findings support Robert Margo’s claim that economic history is currently integrated into economics more often in publications in North America than in Europe.
Since the cliometric revolution, the future of economic history has been discussed in relation to its supposedly increasing integration with economics and other disciplines. Any well-grounded argument in this regard would require a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the scientific production of economic historians in recent decades. This article provides a systematic method for collecting and analyzing the scientific production—in the form of indexed articles—of a broad and representative sample of authors who identify themselves as economic historians. From this sample, we have built EconHist, a relational database that contains the bibliometric information provided by Scopus, and the biographical information from authors’ curricula vitae between 1980 and 2019. Finally, we show the opportunities and difficulties related to the design and development of such a database.
Revista de Historia Económica-Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History, 39 (1), March 2021, pp. 63-98.
One key step in the process of development is the transition from the personalistic rules and privileges that characterize developing societies to open access orders and rational–legal bureaucracies sustaining impersonal rules. This article uses a micro-data set of Spanish officers to study the politicization of the army during the Second Republic (1931–1939) using Franco’s Africanist faction as the case study. The military reforms during 1931–1933 increased the impersonality of rules determining the promotion of officers, but executive discretionary powers persisted. Results suggest that changes in the government affected the dynamics of the army. Under conservative governments (1934–1935), Africanists were promoted more rapidly. Center-left governments during the period of 1931–1933 did not systematically promote Africanists differently, but the revision of promotions in 1933 slowed their careers. The politicization of the army was one of the factors contributing to the military coup that started the Spanish Civil War.
This article focuses on the importance of military factionalism in a nonconsolidated democracy: the Spanish Republic (1931–9). I build a new micro-data set for over 11,000 officers during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) to study how professional and economic interests created divisions within the military and influenced officers’ allegiances during the war. Results confirm that distributional conflicts influenced officers’ decisions in Republican-controlled territories: officers who gained from military reforms in the years before the Civil War and those with more rapid promotions in the months predating the war were more likely to remain loyal to the government. This article also explores the behavioral determinants of officers’ propensity to rebel and finds that hierarchy mattered, as senior officers influenced subordinates’ choices of side.
[Appendix A pdf] [Appendix B pdf] [Appendix C pdf] [Appendix D pdf] [Appendix E pdf]
Data for replication available here (.rar folder)
Blog entries about the paper:
"The Political Economy of the Army in a Nonconsolidated Democracy: Spain (1931-1939)," post at the Economic History Society's blog.
"¿Por un puñado de pesetas? La economía política del ejército en la II República," post in Nada es Gratis
Comparative Political Studies, 52(7), pp. 1,028-1058, 2019.
Violence within armed groups in civil wars is important and understudied. Linking literatures on civil war violence and military politics, this paper examines the conditions in which this fratricidal violence is narrowly selective or arbitrary with respect to concrete disloyal behavior. It uses a unique dataset of executions of officers on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. The paper finds that while much of the violence appeared to target those who actually tried to defect, many non-defectors were likely shot too, due most likely to a pervasive stereotype that officers in general were disloyal to the Republic. This stereotype was used as an information shortcut, and was promoted by political actors. Accordingly, unlikely defectors were likelier to be shot in locations in which less information was available about loyalties and in which political forces that were suspicious of officers as a group were locally stronger.
Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar, 9(5), pp. 52-74, 2016
This paper studies the role of the army in the Spanish institutional development. Contrary to the idea of the army as a monolithic block or other elites’ agent, I develop a new theoretical framework that relies on three insights. First, the army was an independent political agent with great influence over Spanish institutional dynamics. Second, besides the officers’ ideology, the economic and professional interests of the military influenced the stability of Spanish political regimes. Third, the army was divided into factions with opposed economic and professional interests. I finally summarize the implications of the theoretical framework for the Second Spanish Republic and the influence that the economic interests had on military factions and the side chosen by officers in 1936.
In Twisted Modernization: The Political Economy of Contemporary Spain (Pablo Beramendi and Carles Boix, eds.), Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
This chapter studies the evolution of elite networks in Spain from 1920 to 2000, focusing on the connections between political, economic, military, and aristocratic elites across different regime types. Using a novel dataset tracking over 38,000 elite members, we analyze how elite cohesion and circulation patterns changed during Spain's transitions between democratic and authoritarian regimes. Elite networks were generally more cohesive during non-democratic periods, with the highest interconnectedness taking place during Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s. Economic elites showed greater participation in politics under autocratic rule, while military officers were more embedded in political and economic spheres during non-democratic periods. The transition to democracy after 1978 led to decreased overlap between elite groups and greater elite circulation, even if the initial years showed modest elite turnover consistent with Spain's "elite settlement" approach to democratic transition. These findings contribute to understanding how regime types influence elite ruling coalitions and highlight the significant changes in Spain's power structures during its twentieth-century political transformations.
"Researching Racial Covenants in Introductory US Economics History: A Marginal Approach to Teaching About Racism" (with Jenny Gnagey and Rannon Chapman)