UB Economics – Working Papers [ERE]

URI permanent per a aquesta col·leccióhttps://hdl.handle.net/2445/10407

"UB Economics - Working Papers" dóna continuitat des de finals del 2013, als "Documents de Treball de l’Espai de Recerca en Economia (ERE)" de la Facultat d’Economia i Empresa de la Universitat de Barcelona, col·lecció que va néixer l’any 2001.
En aquesta col·lecció, trobareu tots els "Documents de Treball de l’ERE" fins el número 300 que apareixen sota el format "Col.lecció d’Economia", una numeració que tindrà continuitat a partir del número 301 sota el títol d’"UB Economics - Working Papers".

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Marginalism and Stability in Package Allocation Problems and Market Replicas
(2026) Núñez, Marina (Núñez Oliva); Robles Jiménez, Francisco Javier
We revisit the classical tension between stability and marginalism in the package allocation model of Milgrom [2007]. Our main finite-market stability results provide multiple necessary and sufficient conditions for the Banzhaf payoff vector to belong to the core. The key condition is the feasibility of an optimal assignment in which each buyer receives one of his most preferred bundles. Further, we show that the Shapley and Banzhaf payoff vectors coincide if and only if the Banzhaf payoff vector is in the core. We then consider replica economies. We construct a market in which, after finitely many replications, neither the Shapley nor the Banzhaf payoff vector belongs to the core of the replicated game. Strikingly, as the number of replicas tends to infinity, none of those payoff vectors converges to the core. Consequently, they do not converge to a competitive-equilibrium payoff vector in the limit. This stands in contrast to Luo et al. [2024], which shows that, in their setting of assignment games with multiple partnership, both payoff vectors converge to a competitive-equilibrium payoff vector as the number of replicas tends to infinity.
Follow the median: revisiting bubbles and cycles
(2026) Gracia, Eduard
Under very general conditions, the best predictor of any random variable’s observed time series is not its mean but its median. Hence, if we aim to model a variable with a skewed (a.k.a. asymmetric) probability distribution, so mean and median diverge, it is the model’s predicted median path that must be compared to that variable’s observed time series. Thus e.g. rational economic agents base their decisions on their target variables’ expected (a.k.a. mean) paths, which must as a result follow certain rules (mainly no arbitrage); but, if those variables are skewedly distributed, irrational-looking observations may not reflect irrationality, for the median is not subject to the rules rationality imposes on the mean. Yet economic models rarely pose this hypothesis and, when they do, their skewness assumptions often present major theoretical and/or empirical drawbacks. This paper proposes instead to assume normally distributed (hence symmetric) random perturbations and then rely on economics’ standard nonlinear assumptions (e.g. diminishing returns, decreasing marginal utility, etc.) to skew relevant variables’ distributions endogenously. (.../...)
Democratic backsliding in times of crisis
(2026) Jelnov, Artyom; Senkov, Maxim
In a political-agency model, an incumbent can initiate a restrictive policy in response to a crisis state of the world. Both the opposition and the citizen value the incumbent's policy matching the state; however, they are uncertain about the incumbent's true motives. If the incumbent is of the dictatorial type, a restrictive policy that is not protested by both the opposition and the citizen leads to the start of authoritarian rule. We show that when the incumbent is relatively unlikely to be dictatorial, the presence of radical opposition, protesting the restrictive policy regardless circumstances, can reduce voter welfare: it eliminates the efficient state-matching equilibrium, since the opposition never fully reveals dictatorial incumbents. Conversely, when the incumbent is relatively likely to be dictatorial, a high probability of radical opposition can increase voter welfare by deterring the dictatorial type from implementing the restrictive policy.
The Network Structure of the Urban Revolution
(2025) Benati, Giacomo; Lozano, Sergi
Although long-distance interaction dates back to Prehistory, the scale and complexity of exchange during the Urban Revolution are unparalleled. How did early urban societies organize transcontinental trade without modern transportation, financial systems, or institutional infrastructures? To answer this, we formally analyze the Uruk Expansion in Chalcolithic Mesopotamia (~4000–3000 BCE), arguably the first episode of “globalization” in human history. Using network analysis on a new dataset of over 1,700 settlements and routes, we show that Uruk’s early river-based supply chains evolved through diaspora-driven bridging ties that generated small-world network structures, fostering integration and system-wide connectivity. This transformation—from dendritic to integrated networks—challenges dependency-based explanations and instead supports a market formation model of early urban exchange.
The expansion of primary education in an industrialising economy: Catalonia in the age of mass schooling (1860-1930)
(2026) Martínez Galarraga, Julio; Prat Sabartés, Marc
This paper studies the main patterns and trends observed in primary education in Catalonia between 1860 and 1930. The information gathered from official education statistics makes it possible to track several primary education variables over time, including pupils, schools, teachers and public spending, at 10-year intervals, broken down by public and private schooling and by gender. This study, which is primarily descriptive in nature, provides new quantitative evidence that highlights the difficulties faced by the public provision of primary education in achieving progress in Catalonia during those years, the significant expansion of private education, the disparities between rural and urban areas (where demographic pressure on the education system was greater), and the advances and setbacks in achieving gender equality. Together, the findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how a society—in this case, Catalonia—coped with the challenge posed by the spread of mass schooling during the early stages of industrialisation, within a backward institutional framework typical of Southern Europe’s peripheral regions.
The relationship between high-stakes assessments and anxiety: Consequences for academic performance
(2025) Oliete, Natalia; Valbuena, Javier; Choi Mendizábal, Álvaro B. (Álvaro Borja)
The use of high-stakes assessments has become widespread in educational systems. While they can potentially boost student achievement, they may also increase anxiety levels, which could negatively affect their academic performance. These effects might not be uniform, varying across schools and among distinct student profiles. In this paper we examine the relationship between anxiety and performance and investigate how high-stakes assessments influence students' anxiety levels and academic outcomes. We conduct our analysis at the average level and by several individual characteristics, estimating a series of models using data from an international sample of countries. This allows us to shed new light on the winners and losers of the policy, and to get a deeper understanding of the role of anxiety. The study provides first international evidence by exploiting novel cross-country information on high-stakes testing. Our results extend previous research by revealing a strong negative correlation between student anxiety and academic performance, regardless of whether the country implements high-stakes testing. Furthermore, the heterogeneity analysis by socioeconomic level indicates that students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds exhibit a stronger negative association between anxiety and performance.
Socioeconomic Inequality in Unmet Long-Term Care Needs
(2025) Andrés, Raquel; Stoyanova, Alexandrina Petrova
Europe’s rapidly ageing population poses critical challenges for long-term care (LTC) systems, particularly guaranteeing equitable access. While socio-economic disparities in LTC utilisation are well documented, inequalities in unmet needs—the gap between required and received care—are less studied. Using the 2019 European Health Interview Survey for Spain, we quantify the care gap in hours and classify unmet needs as full, partial, or none. (...)
Mitigating Generative AI Hallucinations
(2025) De Chiara, Alessandro; Manna, Ester; Singh, Shubhranshu
We theoretically investigate whether AI developers or AI operators should be liable for the harm the AI systems may cause when they hallucinate. We find that the optimal liability framework may vary over time, with the evolution of the AI technology, and that making the AI operators liable can be desirable only if it induces monitoring of the AI systems. We also highlight non-trivial relationships between welfare and reputational concerns, human supervision ability, and the accuracy of the technology. Our results have implications for regulatory design and business strategies.
What Happens When Some Agents Over-Demand in Claims Problems
(2025) Yin, Xiuxia; Calleja, Pere; Izquierdo Aznar, Josep Maria
In claims problems, we explore three characterizations of the constrained equal awards rule based on how allocations respond to an agent increasing its claim. In the first one we ensure that over-demanding by an unsatisfied agent does not harm others. In the second one we require that such over-demanding leaves the entire allocation unchanged. Finally, in the third one we weaken this last condition by protecting only the initially fully compensated agents.
The toys that made us: The role of game in gender gaps
(2025) Bianchi, Daniel; Choi Mendizábal, Álvaro B. (Álvaro Borja); Jerrim, John
Early gender gaps condition future educational decisions and labor market and social outcomes. There is extensive evidence reporting the existence of significant gender gaps in mathematical and scientific competencies at age 15. It has been suggested these patterns may explain why men tend to make a clean sweep on STEM careers. This has led to a debate on which factors may be driving gender gaps in educational outcomes. While some authors point to the existence of differences in psychological traits by gender, others focus on external factors, such as socioeconomic characteristics, parental values and educational trajectories. (...)
Sectoral markups, factor substitution and factor-augmenting technical progress
(2025) Alonso Carrera, Jaime; Freire Serén, María Jesús; Raurich, Xavier
We measure sectoral price markups, elasticities of substitution between capital and labor, and rates of factor-augmenting technical change in the United States from 1947 to 2010. Our approach utilizes the user cost of capital to decompose firms' operating surplus into capital payments and profits, enabling a direct computation of sectoral price markups. The results reveal that these markups are time-varying and exhibit a positive trend since 1980 in both manufacturing and services, mirroring the observed behavior of markups in the aggregate economy. Additionally, we estimate the elasticities of substitution and the rates of technical progress for each sector. We find that the estimated values of these technological parameters vary significantly depending on the assumption regarding the market structure of sectoral goods: perfect or imperfect competition.
Financial Incentives to Fertility: From Short to Long Run
(2025) Rodríguez Román, F. Javier; Cruces de Sousa, Lidia
Are financial incentives effective in increasing fertility rates? Empirical evidence suggests they are, primarily in the short run (around implementation). Can such policies also increase the total number of children in the long run? We address this question by using a structural life-cycle model of fertility and labor supply, calibrated to replicate the short-run effects of a cash transfer paid at childbirth implemented in 2007 in Spain. (...)
Trickle-Down Economics, Merit, and Redistribution: An Experiment with the Poorest and Richest US Americans
(2025) Brunetti, Roberto; Grimalda, Gianluca; Marino, Maria
Despite growing income inequality, demand for redistribution has remained stagnant, which is particularly puzzling for the poor. We investigate whether attitudes toward “trickle-down” economics and preferences for fairness affect demand for redistribution. We involve US residents in the bottom (N = 1, 200) and top (N = 1, 146) 20% of the income distribution in experimental redistributive decisions from high-income real-life entrepreneurs to low-income recipients. (...)
Do fiscal rules affect growth?
(2025) Delalibera, Bruno R.; Brum, Angélica; Pereira, Luciene
Over the past three decades, many countries have adopted fiscal rules. This paper studies their impact on economic growth using an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth, where the government imposes both a debt rule and a budget balance rule. The model shows that fiscal rules are not neutral: their design and interaction, through an endogenously adjusting tax rate, directly shape savings, capital accumulation, and long-term growth. The model identifies conditions under which a balanced growth path exists and highlights the possibility of multiple steady states. (...)
Reconciling marginalism with the core in two-sided markets with money
(2025) Robles Jiménez, Francisco Javier; Van den Brink, René; Núñez, Marina (Núñez Oliva); Robles Jiménez, Laura
In two-sided markets with money, core stability and marginalism are often in conflict. We reconcile them with two main results. First, we show that in the assignment game (Shapley & Shubik, 1972), the Banzhaf value is core stable if and only if the game is exact. This is surprising for two reasons: (i) the Banzhaf value is generally not efficient, and (ii) although exactness suffices for the Shapley value to be stable, it is not necessary. Consequently, stability of the Banzhaf value implies stability of the Shapley value, but not vice versa. Second, we consider a family of intra-sector Shapley and Banzhaf values by applying each value separately to the game on the set of buyers assuming all sellers are available and to the game on the set of sellers assuming all buyers are available, and then taking any convex combination. We prove that all such convex combinations lie in the core if and only if the valuation matrix has a dominant diagonal. Under this condition, the equal-weight intra-sector Shapley and Banzhaf values coincide with the fair-division point. Together, these results deliver simple criteria under which marginalist solutions assign stable payoff vectors in the original market.
From Rivals to Allies? CEO Connections in an Era of Common Ownership
(2025) Hutschenreiter, Dennis C.; Qianshuo, Liu
Institutional common ownership of firm pairs in the same industry increases the likelihood of a preexisting social connection among their CEOs. We establish this relationship using a quasinatural experiment that exploits institutional mergers combined with firms' hiring events and detailed information on CEO biographies. In addition, for peer firms, gaining a CEO connection from a hiring firm's CEO appointment correlates with higher returns on assets, stock market returns, and decreasing product similarity between companies. We find evidence consistent with common owners allocating CEO connections to shape managerial decisionmaking and increase portfolio firms' performance.
Project Choice and Social Image Concerns
(2025) Cerrone, Claudia; De Chiara, Alessandro; Manna, Ester; Saroglou, Theo
Employees' desire to impress their employer may lead to suboptimal choices, such as performing tasks that are out of their depth. In this paper, we formalise this intuition in a principal-agent setting and we experimentally analyse its practical relevance. Through a theoretical model, we show that an agent's desire to appear competent to their employer (social image concerns), can result in inefficient project selection. We test this prediction using a laboratory experiment and find that social image concerns increase the likelihood of suboptimal project choices when agents are male and the principal-agent interaction is not anonymous. Our findings have implications for organisational design.
Parental education and the transition to master and PhD studies in Spain
(2024) Vilalta-Bufí, Montserrat; Dopeso-Fernández, Roberto; Kucel, Aleksander
In a context of full equality of opportunity, bachelor graduates’ decision to pursue further studies should not be affected by social origin. Using Spanish data, we analyze the role of parental background on the decision to study for a master degree and a PhD degree. We find that parental background may increase up to 10 percentage points the probability of studying for a master degree and close to 2 percentage points the likelihood of studying for a PhD. We use the KHB method to decompose the parental background effects into direct and indirect ones (Karlson et al., 2012). Indirect effects collect parental background’s influence via previous studies. Our results show that the parental background effect is not mediated by previous studies’ characteristics. Parental education directly affects the probability of studying for a master and PhD degree for bachelor graduates. In contrast, we find negligible effects of parental background on the likelihood of studying for a PhD degree for the master graduates. Since not all master programs give access to PhD studies, we argue that the decision to pursue a PhD is likely taken just after bachelor studies. We conclude that equality of opportunity in Spain can be improved by promoting master and PhD study paths during bachelor studies to all students, with particular emphasis on females and those students with parents without university education.
Inflation and pandemic in Spain
(2024) Tariffi, Leonardo
This paper shows what the main inflation macroeconomics drivers in Spain are. Even if there has been a less than two-digit inflation in the last three decades, it can be emphasized the fact that the inflation rate has raised and declined rapidly in recent years because of its fundamental determinants. Main reasons behind the behaviour of the consumption price index are related to higher prices in the energy sector and a higher government expenditure, particularly after the post-pandemic economy re-opening. Proxy variables such as oil prices free on board in the European Brent market, the 12 months Euribor interest rate of the Economic and Monetary Union, the nominal gross domestic product, the government expenditure of the public administration, and fiscal deficits in terms of the gross domestic product are those variables in which the consumer price index depends on. Changes on interest rates have managed to stabilized inflation rates once again, thereby diminishing the percentage change in the consumer price index.
Monotonic transformation of preferences and Walrasian equilibrium in allocation problems
(2024) Robles Jiménez, Francisco Javier; Núñez, Marina (Núñez Oliva); Robles, Laura
This paper investigates (non-)manipulability properties and welfare effects of Walrasian equilibrium rules in object allocation problems with non-quasi-linear preferences. We focus on allocation problems with indivisible and different objects. The agents are interested in acquiring at most one object. We show that the minimum Walrasian equilibrium rule is the unique rule that is non-manipulable via monotonic transformations at the outside option among the set of Walrasian equilibrium rules. Analogously, we also show that the minimum Walrasian equilibrium rule is also the unique Walrasian equilibrium rule that is non-manipulable by pretending to be single-minded. On the domain of quasi-linear preferences, we introduce a novel axiom: welfare parity for uncontested objects. On this domain, this axiom is enough to characterize the minimum Walrasian equilibrium rule among the set of Walrasian equilibrium rules.

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