Research

We analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on electricity consumption patterns in Spain. We highlight the importance of decomposing total electricity consumption into consumption by firms and by households to better understand the economic and social impacts of the crisis. While electricity demand by firms has fallen substantially, the demand by households has gone up. In particular, during the total lockdown, these effects reached -29% and +10% respectively, controlling for temperature and seasonality. While the electricity demand reductions during the second wave were milder, the demand by firms remained 5% below its normal levels. We also document a change in people’s daily routines in response to the stringency of the lockdown measures, as reflected in their hourlyelectricity consumption patterns.

This article exploits two newspaper archives to track economic policy uncertainty in Spain in 1905-1945, a period of extreme political polarization. We find that the outbreak of the civil war in 1936 was anticipated by a striking upward level shift of uncertainty in both newspapers. We study the dynamics behind this shift and provide evidence of a strong empirical link between increasing uncertainty and the rise of divisive political issues at the time: socio-economic conflict, regional separatism, power of the military, and role of the church. This holds even when we exploit variation in content at the newspaper level. 

The Spanish Survey of Household Finances 2017 (EFF2017) provides detailed information on the income, assets, debt and spending of Spanish households referring to end-2017. Together with the previous waves of 2002, 2005, 2008, 2011 and 2014, the EFF2017 enables the analysis of several phases of the recent economic cycle and of the related developments in Spanish households’ financial position. This paper provides a detailed description of the most relevant methodological aspects in the design and implementation of this sixth edition: the sample design, the questionnaire, the data collection process, the validation of the data, the computation of weights and the imputation procedures. Important characteristics also present in this wave are the oversampling of wealthy households and the panel component of the sample.

The aim of this study is to analyse the quality of the information on indebtedness gathered by the Spanish Survey of Household Finances (“EFF” by its Spanish initials). To this end, we match EFF data with the administrative data from the Central Credit Register (“CIR” by its Spanish initials), which every month details all outstanding loans in excess of €6,000 arranged by individuals with financial institutions in Spain. Given the differences between the two sources in terms of the information they gather, we construct and compare various measurements of household indebtedness. In order to minimise the differences associated with the discrepancies in household composition according to the municipal population register and the EFF, we analyse both the total linked sample and a subset of comparable households. Our findings show that, after controlling for the limitations of the link, indebtedness calculated with the EFF and the CIR is similar. 25.8% of households have mortgage debt according to the EFF, versus 29.9% according to the CIR. Within indebted households, the median mortgage debt recorded in the EFF is only 0.5% lower than the figure according to the CIR. Non-mortgage debt differences are bigger, but not substantial. 18% of households have non-mortgage debt according to the EFF, versus 23% according to the CIR, and the median debt is 10% lower in the EFF. Moreover, the detailed information provided by the survey on the characteristics of households and their respective debts makes it possible to identify the age of the reference person and the existence of debts shared with individuals who are not members of the household as being the characteristics that have the most bearing on the discrepancies between the EFF and the CIR. The findings of this analysis will help improve the gathering of information and the protocols for interviewing households for the EFF.

This article presents annual distributions of aggregate wealth and debt components of Spanish households by income and wealth. Distributions for the period 2002 to 2020 are estimated drawing on the seven available waves of the Spanish Survey of Household Finances, while those for the latest period (2021-2022) are predictions. 

This paper studies the editorial content effects of competition in a concentrated media market. We construct daily measures of editorial topic coverage of the two leading newspapers in Spain in the late 1980s, ABC and El País, and evaluate the sudden entry of a newspaper, El Mundo, which soon became a market leader, on such editorial choices. We find an statistically significant common trend of coverage in most of the topics that is coexisting with an increasing segmentation among certain topics. Finally, we document that the overall topic coverage of both newspapers became significantly more similar after the entry of El Mundo.