How much is too much: Does the size of income support transfers affect labor supply?

Cash transfer programs pursue mainly protective objectives, but can also impact rural livelihoods by inducing investments in productive activities and changing household labor allocation. We adopt a continuous treatment approach to quantify how households’ labor supply responds to transfer size. We find a shift from paid labor to own farm labor and find that the transfer size is well within a level that would have disincentive effects on time spent on own farm activities. The switch from paid to own farm labor occurs at lower levels of transfers for labor-constrained households, and at higher levels for non-labor constrained households.     

Longevity and Lifespan Variation by Educational Attainment in Spain: 1960–2015

For a long time, studies of socioeconomic gradients in health have limited their attention to between-group comparisons. Yet, ignoring the differences that might exist within groups and focusing on group-specific life expectancy levels and trends alone, one might arrive at overly simplistic conclusions. Using data from the Spanish Encuesta Sociodemográfica and recently released mortality files by the Spanish Statistical Office (INE), this is the first study to simultaneously document (1) the gradient in life expectancy by educational attainment groups, and (2) the inequality in age-at-death distributions within and across those groups for the period between 1960 and 2015 in Spain. Our findings suggest that life expectancy has been increasing for all education groups but particularly among the highly educated. We observe diverging trends in life expectancy, with the differences between the low- and highly educated becoming increasingly large, particularly among men. Concomitantly with increasing disparities across groups, length-of-life inequality has decreased for the population as a whole and for most education groups, and the contribution of the between-group component of inequality to overall inequality has been extremely small. Even if between-group inequality has increased over time, its contribution has been too small to have sizable effects on overall inequality. In addition, our results suggest that education expansion and declining within-group variability might have been the main drivers of overall lifespan inequality reductions. Nevertheless, the diverging trends in longevity and lifespan inequality across education groups represent an important phenomenon whose underlying causes and potential implications should be investigated in detail.     

Marketing,public relations,and how Web 2.0 is changing their relationship: A qualitative assessment of PR consultancies operating in Spain

In communication between organisations and consumers, the dividing lines amongst marketing, advertising and public relations are sometimes blurred. The confusion and overlap is more marked with the advent of the Web 2.0 and the proliferation of online campaigns, and associated initiatives. This article presents the results of ten in-depth interviews held with senior managers of PR consultancies operating in Spain in order to study and evaluate how these changes are being tackled from within the sector itself. It concludes that the sector perceives the current context as a great opportunity for growing and consolidating the strategic conception of public relations.     

Networks and collective action

This paper proposes a new measure for a group's ability to lead society to adopt their standard of behavior, which in particular takes account of the time the group takes to convince the whole society to adopt their position. This notion of a group's power to initiate action is computed as the reciprocal of the resistance against it, which is in turn given by the expected absorption time of a related finite state partial Markov chain that captures the social dynamics. The measure is applicable and meaningful in a variety of models where interaction between agents is formalized through (weighted) binary relations. Using Percolation Theory, it is shown that the group power is monotonic as a function of groups of agents. We also explain the differences between our measure and those discussed in the literature on Graph Theory, and illustrate all these concerns by a thorough analysis of two particular cases: the Wolfe Primate Data and the 11S hijackers’ network.     

Work in Transition: Labour Market Life Expectancy and Years Spent in Precarious Employment in Spain 1986–2016

Social Indicators Research - In this paper, we measure the number of years that men and women have been expected to spend in the labour market at age 16 and at age 50 during the period...     

The Effect of Education on the Demographic Dividend

The impact of population structure on economic growth has been studied in recent decades using different methods to estimate the so‐called demographic dividend. Besides, education has been pointed out as a key factor in economic growth. We propose a decomposition of the demographic dividend, into age and education effects. We illustrate the potentialities of the method, deriving an application to Mexico and Spain over the period 1970‐2100. To that end, we estimate the National Transfer Accounts age profiles by schooling level and apply them to recently available population projections stratified by education level. Our results confirm the role of population age structure in the demographic dividend, but also reveal that education attainment can be even more crucial. Moreover, we find that how both age and education effects finally impact on economic growth depends to a great extent on the specific consumption and labor income age profiles in each country.     

On the effects of public and private transfers on capital accumulation: some lessons from the NTA aggregates

Intergenerational transfers are a very important part of our daily economic activity. These transfers, whether familial or public, may influence our economic decisions to the same extent that financial markets do. In this paper, we seek to shed some light on the effects of transfers on capital accumulation in the face of demographic aging. In particular, a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with realistic public and familial transfers drawn from the National Transfer Accounts project is implemented to Spain. Given that, in this case, net familial transfers mainly go from parents to children while public transfers go from children to parents, it is shown that the Spanish baby boom and baby bust could lead to capital depletion and a reduction in consumption per capita.