L’Institut d’Economia de Barcelona (IEB) dedica l’IEB Report núm. 2 de l’any 2020, coordinat per l’investigador i professor Matteo Gamalerio, a tractar de les causes de la fragmentació política que ha experimentat Europa en la darrera dècada, amb l’aparició de nous partits i l’auge del populisme. El focus se centra...

We investigate the impact on work absence of a massive reduction in paid sick leave benefits. We exploit a policy change that only affected public sector workers in Spain and compare changes in the number and length of spells they take relative to unaffected private sector workers. Our results highlight...

Anonymous information platforms (e.g. Airbnb) provide information about experience goods while keeping agents' identity hidden until the transaction is completed. In doing so, they generate heterogeneity in the information levels across consumers. In this paper, I show that such platforms induce a weak increase of offline prices and that only...

This paper provides a comparative assessment of income segregation within cities in 12 countries. We use spatial entropy indexes based on small-scale gridded income data and consistent definition of city boundaries to ensure international comparability of our segregation measures. Results show considerable variation in the levels of income segregation across...

2019: An Intense and Fruitful Year for the IEB. The Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB) has just published its annual report detailing the activities throughout 2019. The document showcases a particularly productive year in which it solidly reflects the commitment of the IEB to its two main founding objectives: to...

This study represents an attempt to understand the U.S. firearms market – the largest in the world – in economic terms. A model of the underlying interplay of legal firearms supply and demand is a prerequisite for reliably evaluating the effectiveness of pertinent existing state and federal firearms policies, and...