"The Institutional Roots of Social Capital: Evidence from Historical Municipal Mergers", with Daniel Montolio. Accepted at the Journal of Economic Growth
featured in: Nada es Gratis
"Historical Family Types and Female Political Representation: Persistence and Change", with Aina Gallego and Dídac Queralt. Forthcoming at the Journal of Politics
"Cultural Distance and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, " with Eleonora Guarnieri. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2023.
featured in: Science and 5centims.cat
"The Legacies of war for Ukraine", with Ellen Munroe, Anastasiia Nosach, Moises Pedrozo, Eleonora Guarnieri, Juan Felipe Riaño and Felipe Valencia. Economic Policy, 2023.
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"Unemployment and Intimate-Partner Violence: A Cultural Approach". Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2021.
featured in: Barcelona GSE Research Focus
"Family Types and Intimate-Partner Violence: A Historical Perspective". Review of Economics and Statistics, 2019.
featured in: Probable Causation, Nada es Gratis
"Spanish Health Benefits for Services of Curative Care", with Ivan Planas-Miret and Jaume Puig-Junoy. European Journal of Health Economics 2005, s1: 66-72.
"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.
"Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction", with Eleonora Guarnieri [draft coming soon]
Why do some cultures go extinct while others prevail? In this paper, we show that a society's risk of cultural extinction---proxied by language loss---is shaped by its ancestral gender norms and by how these norms differ from those of competing cultures. Using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index for a global sample of languages, we start by showing that languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction than those from male-dominant societies. We propose a conceptual framework in which male-dominant societies are more expansionist via two channels: (i) military capacity sustained through surplus extraction, and (ii) demographic pressure through women's specialization in domestic and reproductive labor. As a result, they expand at the expense of more gender-egalitarian groups. We test this prediction in two empirical settings. Leveraging European colonization as a natural experiment, we find that Indigenous societies with more gender-equal norms than their colonizers are more vulnerable to cultural extinction. We examine alternative pre-colonial societal arrangements and find that cultural extinction is best explained by asymmetries in male dominance rather than in hierarchy or dominance more broadly. Exploiting local variation in neighboring groups' gender structure across Africa, we further show that languages from gender-egalitarian societies are less likely to survive in grid cells located close to male-dominant neighbors, with military capacity and population pressure predicting territorial expansion across the continent.
"Gender Attitudes in Times of Economic Uncertainty", with Natalia Danzer, Nerina Guri, Piotr Paweł Larysz and Alessandro Noventa [draft coming soon]
"A Worldwide Male Dominance Index", with Eleonora Guarnieri
"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.