Household Consumption Responses to Unanticipated Labor Market Transitions (with Javier Gardeazabal) (Review of Economics of the Household. 2025)
We study the under-explored effects of transitions from unemployment to employment on household consumption and income, and compare them with the effects of transitions from employment to unemployment, which have received much more attention. The analysis is extended to see if the effect of these labor market transitions depend on the number of unemployed household members, the phase of the business cycle, and the moderation effect of gender. To conduct this research, we use the combination of Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and difference-in-differences (DID) methods suggested by Abadie (2005), and use survey weights as in Ridgeway et al. (2015) to attain external validity.
The Effect of Economic Shocks on Mental Health Outcomes: Evidence from The Spanish Great Recession (Forum for Health Economics & Policy. 2023)
This research examines the consequences of economic shocks at micro and macro levels on subjective mental health. At the individual level, evidence indicates that individuals displaced from their jobs are likely to report worse mental health, take mental illness drugs, and visit a mental health specialist. Using a shock at the aggregate level, the findings from a diff-in-diff design show that an economic downturn increases the mental health gap between employed and unemployed individuals. However, a recession reduces the prescription of mental health drugs, and medical attendance is insignificant, suggesting the presence of a stigma around mental health illness. Finally, the evidence provided suggests that the effects are heterogeneous, depending on individual characteristics. In particular, those individuals with larger deviations from the social norm are those reporting larger impacts. These findings might be helpful in policy design.
Too Afraid to Vote? The Effects of COVID-19 on Voting Behaviour (with Tania Fernández-Navia and David Tercero-Lucas) (European Journal of Political Economy. 2021).
This paper studies the causal effect of local exposure to COVID-19 on voting behavior and electoral outcomes using evidence from the regional elections held in Spain on 12 July 2020. Exploiting the variation in exposure to COVID-19 and using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we show that turnout was between 2.6 and 5.1 percentage points lower in municipalities that experienced positive cases of COVID-19. In addition, the results show a substantial increase in the probability of voting for nationalist parties. We discuss the idea of perceived fear being the potential mechanism driving our results.
Cultural expenditure of those who enter (or exit) unemployment (With Javier Gardeazabal) (Journal of Cultural Economics. 2021)
We estimate the effect of unemployment on cultural expenditure, income, and the income elasticity of cultural demand. When a household member enters an unemployment spell, households reduce cultural expenditure, and their income falls. Unemployment does not affect participation in cultural markets, and participating households exhibit larger income elasticity. The reduction in cultural expenditure and income is larger for men and individuals who hold a tertiary education degree tend to experience a larger income fall and a smaller cultural expenditure reduction. We find that the reduction in cultural expenditure is much larger during a recession, while the effect of unemployment on household income does not fluctuate that much over the business cycle.
Migrant Deaths, EU Citizens' Immigration Attitudes, and Policy Dilemma (With Thiago De Lucena and Kangoh Lee). Revised and Resubmitted at Canadian Journal of Economics.
This paper studies the effects of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean on European Union citizens’ attitudes toward immigration. Our identification strategy leverages the timing of migrant death shocks on Mediterranean migrant routes relative to interview dates within survey waves and shows that migrant deaths affect attitudes toward immigrants from outside the EU in a positive manner. Migrant-death shock increases very positive feelings toward immigrants from outside the EU by 5.3% and decreases very negative feelings by 4.0%. We do not find effects for effects towards EU citizens. We show that migrant deaths also affect some policy preferences. In particular, while death shocks do not affect the demand for additional measures to fight illegal immigration, they increase the demand for a common EU migration policy
Labor Market Prospects and the Fertility and Location Decisions of Immigrants (With Joan Monras and Javier Vazquez-Grenno). Revise and Resubmit at Regional Science and Urban Economics.
This paper studies how fertility decisions respond to an improvement in labor market prospects using variation from the large and unexpected regularization of undocumented immigrants in Spain implemented during the first half of 2005. This policy change substantially improved the labor market opportunities of affected individuals, especially women, many of whom left the informality of housekeeping service sectors for more formal, stable, and higher paying jobs. We estimate that this improvement in labor market conditions increased fertility rates using two alternative difference-in-differences strategies that compare the fertility behavior of “eligible” and “non-eligible” candidate women to obtain legal status, both on aggregate and at the local level. Our preferred estimates indicate that the regularization increased fertility rates among affected women by 12.6 percent.