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.

Since 1992, the Association of Education Economics (AEDE) has annually organized the Meeting of the Economics of Education Association. The XXVII Meeting will be hosted by the University of Barcelona (UB).

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.

The Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB) has published “IEB’s Report on Fiscal Federalism and Public Finance” 2018. For another year, the document compiles the various ‘IEB reports’ published during the year 2018 focused on the analysis of infrastructure financing, the use of fiscal policies in relation to the phenomenon of gentrification, the role of public budgets after the great fiscal crisis, and tax havens. The report has contributions from IEB researchers and leading international experts.
The IEB has been publishing this annual report since 2009. Conceived as a research paper on fiscal federalism, the IEB Report has broadened its thematic base to provide rigorous analysis of issues of general interest to society.

One of the main reasons that cities exists and thrive is that high population density yields certain economic benefits. However, high densities require transportation, and transport infrastructure, especially highways, are expensive. In addition, when you travel by car, you impose a cost to the rest of the society.

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.