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I work as an Economist at the National Office of Foresight & Strategy of the Spanish Government, an institution responsible for studying and planning the future of the country in the medium- and long-term. My areas of work are economic growth and innovation, the future of work, inequality and education. Previous to this, I worked as a Senior Economist in BBVA Research.
I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Minnesota. Prior to that, I studied at CEMFI and Universidad Pública de Navarra. |
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WORKING PAPERS
Abstract: Much research has documented a decline in the aggregate labor share in the United States and other countries. Yet, I document that this is not a general phenomenon across industries. In fact, there has been a divergence between services and non-services industries in the United States since 1980. Over this period, the labor share for services industries increased by an average of 6 percentage points, whereas for the rest of industries it decreased by an average of 14 percentage points. A similar diverging pattern is also present in several European countries. By exploiting industry-level data, I find that the divergence is occurring in the large majority of sub-industries, and is correlated with changes in labor intensity across sub-industries. In order to understand the underlying mechanisms behind this divergence, I build a quantitative two-sector model and show that the decline in the aggregate labor share and the divergence across industries are both consistent with the observed declining trend in the relative price of investment goods. Critically, differences in the substitutability between capital and labor, and differences in technical change across industries can account for the divergence.
Staggered Contracts and Unemployment during the Great Recession: Evidence from Spain,
with Ernesto Villanueva
- A blog post about this paper (an early version) on Nada es Gratis (in Spanish)
with Ernesto Villanueva
- A blog post about this paper (an early version) on Nada es Gratis (in Spanish)
Abstract: We study the impact of widespread downward wage rigidity on employment flows on the onset of the Great Recession. Downward wage rigidity is due to the fact that sector-level collective agreements in Spain are automatically extended to all firms, setting wage minima for workers in the same province-industry-skill cell. We identify the impact of wage rigidity on employment because, unlike settled ones, newly bargained contracts are able to adjust to aggregate shocks. Using Social Security data and various econometric methods we find that agreements bargained after the fall of Lehman Brothers settled an average wage growth of 1.8%, while agreements signed before September 15th, 2008 settled mean wage increases of 3.1%. Among workers subject to wage rigidity, the probability of job loss between 2009 and 2010 and that being unemployed by the end of 2012 was 1% higher than among the rest. Those findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the staggering of contracts and the inability to renegotiate contracts amplify aggregate shocks.
Abstract: Top wealth inequality in the United States has increased dramatically since the 1980s. This paper documents that part of this increase relates to the rise of superstar firms. We build a novel owner-firm matched panel dataset using information from the official records of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Forbes, and Compustat. Using this data, we document that: (i) firms at the upper end of the market value distribution are disproportionately controlled by individuals at the top of the wealth distribution, (ii) these individuals invest a large fraction of their net worth in one or two main firms, which we interpret as evidence of lack of asset diversification, and (iii) the output, employment, and market value shares accounted for by these firms has increased substantially over the last 30 years.
Discretizing a Process with Non-zero Skewness and High Kurtosis,
with Simone Civale and Fatih Fazilet [online appendix] [codes]
with Simone Civale and Fatih Fazilet [online appendix] [codes]
Abstract: We develop and test a discretization method to calibrate a Markov chain that features non-zero skewness and high kurtosis. The proposed method applies the logic of Tauchen (1986) to a first-order autoregressive process with normal mixture innovations, which, as we discuss, can be calibrated to feature non-zero skewness and high kurtosis. We then illustrate an application of our method in an Aiyagari economy. We find that an idiosyncratic shock with higher kurtosis decreases the equilibrium interest rate, whereas higher left skewness increases it.
