Cross‐country data on skills and the quality of schooling: A selective survey
Scores in standardized international student achievement tests and some recent adult literacy studies provide interesting data on the quality of educational outputs and on the skill level of the population that can be a useful complement to the data on the quantity of schooling which have been most commonly used in the growth literature. This paper describes the most recent available primary data on the subject, reviews different attempts to organize, standardize, and summarize them, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the existing indicators and their potential usefulness as explanatory variables in empirical analyses of the determinants of income and welfare levels and growth ra…
The Stabilizing Role of Government Size
This paper presents an analysis of how alternative models of the business cycle can replicate the stylized fact that large governments are associated with less volatile economies. Our analysis shows that adding nominal rigidities and costs of capital adjustment to an otherwise standard RBC model can generate a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of output. However, in the model, we find that the stabilizing effect is only due to a composition effect and it is not present when we look at the volatility of private output. Given that empirically we also observe a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of consumption, we modify the model by i…
Search, Nash bargaining and rule-of-thumb consumers
Abstract This paper analyses the effects of introducing two typical Keynesian features, namely rule-of-thumb (RoT) consumers and consumption habits, into a standard labour market search model. RoT consumers use the margin that hours and wage negotiation provides them to improve their lifetime utility, by narrowing the gap in utility with respect to Ricardian consumers. This margin for intertemporal optimisation has not been studied yet, because this class of restricted agents has been mainly used in models with no equilibrium unemployment. Our approach allows for a deeper study of the effects of shocks on vacancies, unemployment, hours, wages and how they interact. As habits increase, RoT c…
Projecting Pension Expenditures in Spain: On Uncertainty, Communication and Transparency
In this paper we suggest a set of indicators about the future performance of the Spanish public pension system and a suitable method of representing their uncertainty, in order to improve the communication to the public opinion about its main future challenges. Spain seems a particularly interesting case in Europe to illustrate our proposals, since the social security system has been in surplus for nine consecutive years, in sharp contrast to the projections made just a decade ago, but, at the same time, most projections foresee for Spain one of the highest increases in public expenditure among EU countries due to ageing. We argue that simple, transparent, credible, public and periodic indi…
The effects of budget deficit on national saving in the OECD
Abstract In this paper, we estimate a structural VAR using a panel of OECD countries, which includes national saving and budget deficit, both as the ratio to GDP, to test the Ricardian Equivalence hypothesis. In this framework, we separate saving and deficit movements into two types of shocks, associated with structural parameters of these economies. Our results suggest that Ricardian Equivalence did not work in our sample of OECD countries, since private saving compensated only a small fraction budget deficit. This supports the interpretation that the large budget deficits have been a very important factor behind the significant increase in real interest rates in the eighties and early nin…
Job Creation in Spain: Productivity Growth, Labour Market Reforms or both?
The benefits implied by changing the growth model are at the heart ofthe heated political and economic debate in Spain. Increases in productivity and the reallocation of employment towards more innovative sectors are defended as the panacea for most of the ills afflicting the Spanish economy. In this paper we use a DSGE model with price rigidities, and labour market search frictions a la Mortensen-issarides, to assess the effects of the change in the growth model onunemployment. In so doing, we assume that the vigorous demand shock which has been mostly responsible for recent economic growth in Spain will be successfully substituted by a productivity shock as the main driver of Spain‘s…
Pensions, Economic Growth and Welfare in Advanced Economies
In this chapter, we analyse the effects of PAYG and funded pension systems on welfare. The debate on the choice between alternative systems focuses on their effects on savings, capital accumulation, labour supply, economic growth and inequality and the potential benefits of mixed systems in which a PAYG system with notional accounts is complemented by a funded pensions system. The main findings are as follows. Firstly, the redistribution of income among individuals makes the PAYG system an important part of any mixed system. Secondly, the design of the pension system should efficiently balance incentives and distortions with equality and insurance against individual idiosyncratic risks. Thi…
Human capital and income inequality revisited
This paper revisits the relationship between human capital and income inequality, using an updated data set on human capital inequality and a novel database on earnings inequality. We find an inver...
Human Capital Inequality, Life Expectancy and Economic Growth
This article presents a model in which inequality affects per capita income when individuals decide to invest in education taking into account their life expectancy, which depends to a large extent on the human capital of their parents. Our results show the existence of multiple steady states depending on the initial distribution of education. The low steady state is a poverty trap in which children raised in poor families have low life expectancy and work as non-educated workers. The empirical evidence suggests that the life expectancy mechanism explains a major part of the relationship between inequality and human capital accumulation. Increases in life expectancy and human capital accumu…
Unemployment, taxation and public expenditure in OECD economies
Abstract This paper considers the financing of productive public goods and social benefits through different types of taxes in a model with unemployment. We incorporate unemployment, caused by the wage-setting behaviour of a monopolistic union, in a neoclassical growth model which integrates a quite detailed structure of taxes used to finance productive public expenditures and social transfers and parameterizes the inefficiency of government to transform taxes into public goods or transfers. The main conclusion is that the relationship between unemployment and labour taxes critically depends on the degree of government efficiency and the unions' perception on how taxes determine the welfare…
FISCAL POLICY, MACROECONOMIC STABILITY AND FINITE HORIZONS
In this paper we analyse the stabilisation properties of distortionary taxes in a New Keynesian model with overlapping generations of finitely-lived consumers. In this framework, government debt is part of net wealth and this adds a number of interesting channels through which fiscal policy could affect output and inflation. Output volatility, in presence of technology shocks, is not substantially affected by the operation of automatic stabilisers but we find interesting composition effects. While the presence of finitely-lived households strengthens the stabilisation performance of distortionary taxes through the reduction of the volatility of consumption, it does so at the cost of more vo…
Fiscal Devaluations in EMU
2013SummaryWe use a small open economy general equilibrium model to analyse the effects of a fiscal devalua-tion in an EMU country. The model has been calibrated for the Spanish economy, which is a goodexample of the advantages of a change in the tax mix given that its tax system shows a positive biasin the ratio of social security contributions over consumption taxes. The preliminary empirical evi-dence for European countries shows that this bias was negatively correlated with the current accountbalance in the expansionary years leading up to the 2009 crisis, a period when many EMU membersaccumulated large external imbalances. Our simulation results point to significant positive effects of…
Fiscal Rules and Macroeconomic Stability
In this paper we analyze the impact of fiscal rules on the effectiveness of fiscal policy as a macroeconomic stabilizing instrument. First, we review the available evidence on the effects of fiscal policy to affect output in the short run and real interest rates and investment and growth in the long run, and we show how the use of fiscal rules has proved useful in restraining debt and deficits. Secondly, we discuss if debt consolidation rules trade off higher output instability in exchange for lower deficits, using three alternative representations of the intertemporal substitution mechanism in a SDGE framework. Our main conclusion is that both the impact of discretionary fiscal policy and …
Human Capital Inequality and Economic Growth: Some New Evidence
This paper provides new measures of human capital inequality for a broad panel of countries. Taking attainment levels from Barro and Lee (2001), we compute Gini coefficients and the distribution of education by quintiles for 108 countries over five-year intervals from 1960 to 2000. Using this new cross-country data on human capital inequality two main conclusions are obtained. First, most countries in the world have tended to reduce the inequality in human capital distribution. Second, human capital inequality measures provide more robust results than income inequality measures in the estimation of standard growth and investment equations.
Service Regulations, Input Prices and Export Volumes: Evidence from a Panel of Manufacturing Firms
Using a panel of firm‐level data from Spanish manufacturers, this study shows that better service regulation reduces the price of intermediate inputs paid by downstream firms. The beneficial cost effects of services reforms extend to both large and small‐to‐medium sized corporations (SME’s), but the former tend to enjoy greater gains. This feature also manifests itself in international markets. We find evidence of an input cost channel through which service regulations affect the volume of exports of large manufacturers, while the evidence of such a channel is weaker for SME’s. Our estimates indicate that, from 1991 to 2007, large firms increased their volume of exports by an average of 20 …
A Small Forward-Looking Macroeconomic Model for EMU
In this paper we estimate a small forward-looking macroeconomic model for EMU which allows us to analyze the transmission mechanism of the monetary policy implemented by the European Central Bank through an interest rate rule that stabilizes inflation and output. The estimation of this model, which comprises forward-looking versions of the IS and the Phillips curves as well as the interest rate rule, is conducted by GMM using quarterly data from 1986 to 2000. We find that this simple model matches the dynamic properties of the output gap, inflation and the interest rate in EMU quite accurately. We also perform several exercises that show the response of output, inflation and interest rates …
The Stabilizing Role of Government Size
This paper presents an analysis of how alternative models of the business cycle can replicate the stylized fact that large governments are associated with less volatile economies. Our analysis shows that adding nominal rigidities and costs of capital adjustment to an otherwise standard RBC model can generate a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of output. However, in the model, we find that the stabilizing effect is only due to a composition effect and it is not present when we look at the volatility of private output. Given that empirically we also observe a negative correlation between government size and the volatility of consumption, we modify the model by i…
Automatic stabilizers, fiscal rules and macroeconomic stability
This paper analyzes the effect of the fiscal structure upon the trade-off between inflation and output stabilization in the presence of technological shocks in a DGE model with nominal and real rigidities. The model reproduces the main features of European economies and it integrates a rich menu of fiscal variables as well as a target on the debt to output ratio. The main result of this paper is that distortionary taxes tend to increase output volatility relative to lump-sum taxes unless substantial rigidities are present. We explore in detail the mechanisms that generate such a result, and the conditions under which the supply-side effects of distortionary taxes and the procyclical behavio…
Fiscal flows in Europe: The redistributive effects of the EU budget
Fiscal Flows in Europe: The Redistributive Effects of the EU Budget. — In this paper we analyze the redistributive effects of the EU budget among European countries, exploring the relationship between income and fiscal flows, both in per capita terms. Using a new data set on EU budgets from 1986 to 1998, we find that the EU budget has a redistributive effect, though only on its expenditure side. The most redistributive expenditure category is the Regional Fund, followed by the Social Fund and by the guarantee section of the EAGGF. All of them have become increasingly redistributive in time. Total budgetary revenues show only proportionality with income. As regards the net financial balance,…
Potential Growth and Business Cycle in the Spanish Economy: Implications for Fiscal Policy
An accurately estimation of the cyclical position of an economy is a necessary condition for the success of fiscal stabilisation policies. In this paper we show that the estimation of the output gap by means of decomposing a production function produces similar results to univariate and multivariate methods, increasing their robustness and allowing us to conclude that most of the information on the economic cycle is included in the cyclical component of the unemployment rate. The results also indicate that there is reduced uncertainty about the periods when the Spanish economy has clearly been in a deep recession or in a sharp expansion. These periods have been limited and of relatively sho…
Educational attainment in the OECD, 1960-2010. Updated series and a comparison with other sources
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. This paper describes the construction of updated series on the educational attainment of the adult population for a sample of 22 OECD countries covering the period 1960-2010. These series are then compared with (the OECD subsample of) the latest available version of other cross-country data sets on average years of schooling that are commonly used in the literature. Finally, statistical measures of the information content of the different series are constructed using the procedure developed by Krueger and Lindhal (K&L, 2001) and de la Fuente and Doménech (D&D, 2006). The exercise shows that there are important differences in quality across data sets and suggests that su…