Investigación

Agents with independent risks (regions) often create unions and delegate re-distributive power to a central institution (center) that provides risk-sharing through costly transfers. However, there is the risk that regions free-ride on each other; this risk may be exacerbated when the center cannot commit to future policies. %This problem is particularly present in fiscal federations.

We study a differential game of two regions that make savings decisions and a benevolent center that sets transfers but lacks commitment. One region always ends up bankrupt and the center provides a bailout: as the poor region enters bankruptcy, there is an upward jump in transfers to the poor region that coincides with a downward jump in the poor region's consumption. Delegation to a center is Pareto-improving provided that the center's welfare weights reflect initial wealth differences between regions. However, once asymmetries in regions' wealth and the center's welfare weights become large, dynamics become unstable, thus hastening impoverishment and bail-outs.

Fixed-term contracts account for a big share of employment in many developed countries. They entail an excess dissolution of matches that can affect workers' labor market performance over their careers. Using rich administrative data from Spain, which allows us to track workers' labor history, we characterize the prevalence and persistence of temporary employment over the life cycle. We focus on the fraction of time under this type of contract as our main empirical tool, and we categorize workers accordingly. We find that employment under fixed-term contracts is widespread, even for mid-career workers, with 30% of them spending more than 50% of their working time under these types of contracts. Workers with a higher prevalence of fixed-term contracts during the early years in the labor market show a higher level and more persistent temporary rate later in their careers. When comparing mid-career workers by their predominant contract type, we find that they start their careers with similar job finding and separation rates. However, differences increase as they age, which suggests a human capital mechanism at work. 

I develop a model of endogenous default for a small open economy with two levels of government to study the effect of decentralization and fiscal rules over default risk. I build on the classical Arellano model by separating the sovereign into a federal government and a region. Each entity provides a different public good, and the federal government issues risky bonds and is ultimately responsible for the region's financing. In equilibrium, decentralization introduces additional default risk, which increases with the bias of the regional governments towards their own public good. Fiscal rules on regional spending can limit default risk associated with decentralization, while debt ceilings do not seem effective. 

España ante el reto de los fondos NGEU: ¿último tren para la I+D?

El ahorro de los hogares españoles en tiempos de pandemia (junto con Camilo Ulloa y Juan Ramón García)

España | I+D en el sector privado: con los fondos NGEU no basta (en El Español)

Ahorrar en tiempos de pandemia (en El Español, junto con Camilo Ulloa y Juan Ramón García)