SEMINARIOS Y WORKSHOPS

Abstract:

“No hay salud sin recursos humanos para la salud” (Campbell y otros, 2013) y la preocupación por abordar los problemas relacionados con la disponibilidad de médicos y otros profesionales sanitarios para afrontar los crecimientos progresivos de la demanda está en la agenda de prácticamente todos los países desarrollados. También es una inquietud constante en los principales organismos internacionales de desarrollo económico, sanitario y social.

Contar con herramientas de planificación y gestión con las que superar y prever los desequilibrios que han marcado los mercados laborales sanitarios en un reto. La planificación de médicos es una tarea compleja y multifactorial. Es necesario ajustar perfiles de productividad, estimar tendencias epidemiológicas o responder a los parámetros organizativos de gestión y organización de la asistencia sanitaria. Pero a pesar de la complejidad, resultan imprescindibles para formular políticas y apoyar la toma de decisiones por parte de los agentes interesados en el momento adecuado, sobre los factores que inciden en la oferta y la demanda del talento humano en salud.

Existing studies of state-building often endeavor to explain incumbent decisions to project state authority under non-democratic regimes. Yet, we argue that the introduction of democratic competition often gave rise to a state-building strategy that followed a different logic than existing theories suggest. Specifically, elections provided information on where threats to an incumbent resided, leading to a more direct and efficient deployment of bureaucrats and strategic public goods (e.g., education and roads). These state-building efforts generally targeted areas governed by the incumbent’s political opposition. We label this “politicized state-building.” These investments had long-term implications not only for state-building but also basic welfare indicators, including literacy, road-building and future land reform, in affected areas.We test this theory using a regression-discontinuity design and data on local public goods provision and bureaucratic deployment in 1960s Peru under President Fernando Belaunde (1963-1968). Our results suggest a new critical juncture in state-building that shaped both state presence and public goods provision in traditionally peripheral areas.

We test for weak- and strong-form efficiency of fixed-event individual forecast revisions of Brent and WTI prices using proprietary microdata from Energy & Metals Consensus Forecasts produced by Consensus Economics. We contribute to the literature on strong-form efficiency testing by assembling a comprehensive list of empirically relevant variables that are assumed to be in the information set of the forecasters. This set includes variables that aim to capture the effects of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. We overcome the variable selection problem with fat data using a novel form of multiple testing and two popular methods from the penalised regression literature. Our results show that analysts' current revisions are independent of past revisions in most cases, supporting that Brent and WTI price forecast revisions are weakly efficient. However, there is little support for strong-form efficiency, conditional on passing weak efficiency. Indeed, we find that forecasters use past values of several variables to revise their forecasts, including measures of the extent of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Abstract:

We study how signaling skills that are specific to college majors affect labor market outcomes of college graduates. We rely on census-like data and a regression discontinuity design to study the impacts of a well-known award given to top performers on a mandatory nationwide exam in Colombia. The award allows students to signal their high level of specific skills when searching for a job. These students earn 7 to 12 percent more than otherwise identical students lacking the signal. This positive return persists five years after graduation. The signal mostly benefits workers who graduate from low-reputation colleges, and allows workers to find jobs in more productive firms and in sectors that better use their skills. We rule out that the positive earnings returns are explained by human capital. The signal favors mostly less advantaged groups, implying that reducing information frictions about students' skills could potentially shrink earnings gaps. Our results imply that information policies like those that formally certify skills can improve the efficiency in talent allocation of the economy and, at the same time, level the playing field.
 

Abstract:

We study the life cycle pattern of job displacement, including wage losses and displacement risk, in an Overlapping Generations economy with a frictionless labor market. In our model, finitely lived worker-firm pairs accumulate both firm specific and general human capital. Competition for zero tenure workers and the non contractible nature of specific capital implies that wages are higher than productivity for newly tenured workers, and lower for those with longer tenure. In the life cycle, the expected value of the firm is then hump shaped, so displacement risk is naturally u-shaped, as in the data. Our model provides novel insights regarding the empirical relationships between tenure, age, and both displacement risk and post displacement wage loss. While most of the literature uses a framework based on search frictions to study job displacement, our results suggest that the non contractible nature of specific human capital can, by itself, explain most of the empirical regularities under study

Irregular migrants from Africa and the Middle East flow into Europe along land and sea routes under the control of human smugglers. The demise of the Gaddafi regime in 2011 marked the opening of the Central Mediterranean Route for irregular border - crossing between Libya and Italy. This resulted in the immediate expansion of the global smuggling network, which produced an asymmetric reduction in bilateral distance between country pairs across the Mediterranean sea. We exploit this source of spatial and time variation in irregular migration routes to estimate the elasticity of migration intentions to illegal moving costs proxied by distance. We build a novel dataset of geolocalized time-varying migration routes, combined with cross-country survey data on individual intentions to move from Africa (and the Middle East) into Europe. Netting out any country-by-time and pair-level confounders we find a large negative effect of distance along smuggling routes on individual migration intentions. Shorter distances increase the willingness to migrate especially for youth, (medium) skilled individuals and those with a network abroad. The effect is stronger in countries closer to Libya and with weak rule of law.

What are the labor market consequences of changing the legal status of the largest immigrant group in a country? We exploit the enlargement of the European Union in 2007 to study the consequences on the Italian labor market of the permanent legalization of immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria. We use unique administrative employer-employee data covering the universe of private sector workers in Italy to study firms' responses in terms of personnel choices. We find significant effects on firm-level employment: an increase for EU07 migrants at the expense of natives, accompanied by a rise in hirings and separations for the former. The effects appear right away and persist in the following two years. We provide evidence that the findings are mainly driven by the migrants’ legal status change, rather than by the arrival of new workers in the country. We also observe a reduction in per-capita revenues and operative added value, confirming that the effects are likely to be driven by the legalization of previously undocumented workers.

We examine whether judicial review can affect political attitudes by studying how the ruling of the Spanish Constitutional Court on the Catalan Constitution affected Catalan support for secession, which doubled in the 2010-2012 period. Our identification strategy relies on the fact that the ruling occurred amid a public opinion survey. We find that the ruling led to a 20% increase in support for Catalan independence from Spain in 2010. The ruling exacerbated the preferences for decentralization (up to secession) and ignited a backlash against institutions (courts, democracy, etc). Additionally, the polarization of political attitudes depended on (endogenous) identification: the ruling strengthened Catalan identity and increased political polarization in that dimension between people with and without Catalan heritage. Polarization around this issue came at the expense of depolarization in the economic dimension. All of these results are consistent with the predictions of identity politics theories.