The IEB (Barcelona Institute of Economics) and the Department of Economics in the School of Economics at the University of Barcelona encourages expressions of interest from economics postdoctoral researchers that are willing to apply to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme and consider choosing the University of Barcelona as the host institution.   The Barcelona…

El catedrático Alejandro Esteller-Moré, investigador del Instituto de Economía de Barcelona (IEB), ha sido nombrado co-editor ejecutivo de la revista Hacienda Pública Española / Review of Public Economics para el período 2024-2026. Esta nueva responsabilidad la ejercerá junto a Diego Martínez López, catedrático de la Universidad Pablo Olavide de Sevilla. Hacienda Pública Española/Review of Public…

Una de las grandes líneas de investigación del Instituto de Economía de Barcelona (IEB) desde su fundación ha sido el federalismo fiscal. Históricamente, ha destacado por integrar un grupo de investigadores que han sido un referente, tanto en España como a escala internacional, en el estudio y la investigación de las finanzas de los sistemas…

Decentralized fiscal decision-making should serve to enhance welfare by promoting allocative efficiency gains and fostering greater political accountability. Within such an institutional framework, individuals are assumed to be willing to pay, at least, no less taxes than those they pay in a centralized system. We test this hypothesis by means of a survey experiment, leveraging the process of decentralization that has unfolded in Spain over the last 25 years. Our results suggest that individuals have very limited awareness of the tier of government to which they pay their taxes, frequently assuming the system to be centralized. This holds true even in regions where tax decentralization is maximum, as is the case of Spain’s foral communities. On ‘discovering decentralization’ (i.e., being informed that a tax is more decentralized than initially perceived), an individual’s marginal willingness to pay taxes undergoes only a minimal change, with the exception of that of personal income tax. These findings raise questions about the purported benefits of tax decentralization.

We analyse how grade distributions change when higher education evaluations transition online and disentangle the mechanisms that help to explain the change observed in students’ results. We leverage administrative panel data, survey data and data on course plans from a large undergraduate degree at the University of Barcelona. We show that grade averages increase and their dispersion reduce. Changes are driven by students from the lower end of the performance distribution and by a reduction in the occurrence of fail grades; however, we do not find evidence for artificial `grade adjusting’ to explain the phenomenon. We are also able to dismiss shifts in the composition of test takers, improvements in teaching quality or in learning experiences and increases in student engagement. While changes in the assessment formats employed do not appear to mediate the causal relationship between online evaluation and higher grades, we identify more dispersed evaluation opportunities and increased cheating as explanatory factors.

El Instituto de Economía de Barcelona (IEB) celebró el Foro Fiscal 3.1. y lo hizo con la participación de un nutrido grupo de destacados expertos académicos, de la administración, instituciones y empresas. Entre ellos, Ruud DE Mooij, Director Adjunto de Asuntos Fiscales del Fondo Monetario Internacional. De Mooij intervino en la jornada con una conferencia…