The Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB) will host its V Workshop on Urban Economics on the 21st and 22th June 2018. The aim of the workshop is to bring together original research in the area of urban economics. Both theoretical and empirical papers are welcome. After a revision by the Scientific Committee. The accepted papers will be presented in sessions that will be complemented with three plenary sessions.

Desde 1992 se vienen celebrando anualmente las Jornadas de Economía de la Educación bajo la dirección de la Asociación de Economía de la Educación (AEDE). En 2018, la 27ª edición se celebrará en Barcelona. Las XXVII Jornadas contarán con reconocidos expertos nacionales…

This paper quantifies the joint effect of on-the-job training and workers’ on- the-job learning decisions on aggregate employment. We present an Index of On-the-job Human Capital Acquisition (OJHCA), based on data from the OECD Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. The objective of the index is to capture both formal and informal learning in the workplace. We document a strong positive association between the two components of our index, i.e., on-the-job training and on-the- job learning. We also show that the index is positively correlated with employment across OECD economies. To explain these stylized facts, we build a search and matching model with on-the-job human capital acquisition that depends on both on-the-job training provided by firms and on the workers’ level of on-the-job learning. We calibrate the model to the Canadian economy and adjust the learning and training marginal costs to match cross-country levels in the human capital index. We compare the model’s predictions with the data and we conclude that differences in marginal costs are necessary to match the differences observed in employment rates across countries. We also extend the model including payroll taxes and education. The model is able to reproduce the observed differences in employment rates between countries with the highest and the lowest level of OJHCA.

El Instituto de Economía de Barcelona (IEB) ha publicado el ‘Informe IEB sobre Federalismo Fiscal y Finanzas Públicas’ 2018. Un año más, el documento recopila los ‘IEB Reports’ publicados durante el año 2018 dedicados al análisis de la financiación de las infraestructuras, la utilización de las políticas fiscales contra el fenómeno de la gentrificación, el papel de los presupuestos públicos tras la gran crisis fiscal y los paraísos fiscales. El informe cuenta con aportaciones de los investigadores del IEB y de destacados expertos internacionales.
El IEB publica su informe anual desde el 2009. Concebido como un documento de estudio sobre federalismo fiscal, el IEB Report ha ampliado su base temática para aportar a la sociedad un análisis riguroso sobre temas de interés general.

Una de las principales razones por las cuales las ciudades existen y prosperan es que la alta densidad de población produce ciertos beneficios económicos. Sin embargo, las altas densidades de población requieren transporte y, las infraestructuras de transporte, especialmente las autopistas, son caras. Además, cuando viajas en coches, impones un gasto al resto de la sociedad.

We study the US city size distribution over space. This paper makes two contributions to the empirical literature on city size distributions. First, this study uses data from different definitions of US cities in 2010 to study the distribution of cities in space, finding significant patterns of dispersion depending on city size. Second, the paper proposes a new distance-based approach to analyse the influence of distance on the city size distribution parameters, considering both the Pareto and lognormal distributions. By using all possible combinations of cities within a 300-mile radius, results indicate that the Pareto distribution cannot be rejected in most of the cases regardless of city size. Placebo regressions validate our results, thereby confirming the significant effect of geography on the Pareto exponent.