Education and political behaviour : evidence from the Catalan linguistic reform

This paper studies the relationship between schooling and political behaviour in ethnically divided societies. It draws on survey data from Catalonia to investigate how the introduction in 1983 of a bilingual education system affects political behaviour. Using within and between cohort variation in exposure to Catalan language at school, we find that individuals who have experienced greater exposure to teaching in Catalan are more likely to declare to have voted in 1999 regional elections and to have chosen a Catalanist party

Identity and language policies

The process of individual identity formation is still an enigma, as it is the capacity of public bodies to intervene on it. In 1983 the Catalan education system became bilingual, and Catalan, together with Spanish, was taught in schools. Using survey data from Catalonia and exploiting within and between cohort variation in exposure to Catalan language at school, results show that individuals who have experienced greater exposure to teaching in Catalan are more likely to say that they feel more Catalan than Spanish. Interestingly, the effect appears to be present also among individuals whose parents do not have Catalan origins. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to analyze how policies affect individual identity.

Identity and language policies

The process of individual identity formation is still an enigma, as it is the capacity of public bodies to intervene on it. In 1983 the Catalan education system became bilingual, and Catalan, together with Spanish, was taught in schools. Using survey data from Catalonia and exploiting within and between cohort variation in exposure to Catalan language at school, results show that individuals who have experienced greater exposure to teaching in Catalan are more likely to say that they feel more Catalan than Spanish. Interestingly, the effect appears to be present also among individuals whose parents do not have Catalan origins. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to analyze how policies affect individual identity

Financial intermediation, economic development and business cycles fluctuations.

Identifying the effects of the financial sector on economic growth and business cycles fluctuations has been one the main debates in economics during the last decades. While a lot of progress has been done, we are still far from fully understanding the channels linking the financial sector with the rest of the economy. In the first chapter I focus on the relation between financial development and economic growth. I obtain a measure of the impact of financial development on output from a dynamic general equilibrium model with a productive financial sector. The model predicts that having access to a better financial technology reduces the cost of credit and increases the net return of investment, generating positive and sizeable effects on output. The benefits from a better financial technology are maximized when it is used to invest in ex-ante riskier, but more profitable, investment projects. In the following two chapters I focus on the relation between the performance of the financial sector and business cycle fluctuations. First, I study the impact of credit standards policies. The model used is able to replicate the countercyclical pattern of credit standards documented by the literature. The increase in the probability of default during expansionary periods reduces the efficiency with which investment is transformed into capital. In addition, the increase in the default rate reduces the return of savings, which in turn reduces the labor supply. Second, I study the effects of the financial sector to the economy through the collateral channel for the case of Spain. I find that loosing monetary policy autonomy is of first order importance to cushion risk premium shocks, while this is not the case for housing demand shocks. In addition, labor market rigidities provide stronger amplification effects to all type of shocks than financial frictions do

Education and political behaviour : evidence from the Catalan linguistic reform

This paper studies the relationship between schooling and political behaviour in ethnically divided societies. It draws on survey data from Catalonia to investigate how the introduction in 1983 of a bilingual education system affects political behaviour. Using within and between cohort variation in exposure to Catalan language at school, we find that individuals who have experienced greater exposure to teaching in Catalan are more likely to declare to have voted in 1999 regional elections and to have chosen a Catalanist party.

Phase-covariant quantum benchmarks

We give a quantum benchmark for teleportation and quantum storage experiments suited for pure and mixed test states. The benchmark is based on the average fidelity over a family of phase-covariant states and certifies that an experiment cannot be emulated by a classical setup, i.e., by a measure-and-prepare scheme. We give an analytical solution for qubits, which shows important differences with standard state estimation approach, and compute the value of the benchmark for coherent and squeezed states, both pure and mixed

Education, language and identity

The process of individual identity formation is still an enigma, as is the capacity of public bodies to intervene in it. In 1983, the Catalan education system became bilingual, and Catalan, along with Spanish, was taught in schools. Using survey data from Catalonia we show that respondents who have been exposed for a longer time period to teaching in Catalan have stronger Catalan feelings. The effect also appears to be present among individuals whose parents do not have Catalan origins; in addition the reform affects political preferences and attitudes towards the organization of the State

Coordinating macroprudential policies within the Euro Area: the case of Spain

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, there is consensus on the need for macroprudential policies to promote financial stability. However, the optimal way to implement such policies in the Euro area is a question open to debate, given that countries have to coordinate. In this paper, we propose a two-country, two-sector monetary union dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE) with housing to analyze the optimal implementation of macroprudential policies in the Euro area. Currently, Spain is the only country within the EU that has not established a macroprudential regulator. We use Spain as a natural experiment to study the effects of a lack of coordination in the use of macroprudential policies in the European Monetary Union (EMU). We focus on a particular macroprudential policy, a rule regarding the loan-to-value ratio, which responds countercyclically to credit booms. We find that such a policy is welfare enhancing for the Euro area. Nevertheless, if one country does not implement the policy, but the rest of the EMU does, as in the current situation with Spain, this country still yields some benefits as a result of its partners' implementation of the policy because it gains from a more stable financial system without incurring any output costs. However, if all Euro countries actively implement the policy, the welfare gains for all of them are larger

Russian language skills and employment in the Former Soviet Union

During the Soviet era, proficiency in the Russian language was often a ticket to attractive employment opportunities in the member republics. Does it still contribute to securing employment in the former Soviet republics after two decades of transition? Using data from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the years 2008-2010, this paper demonstrates that Russian language skills remain economically valuable. The baseline estimates suggest that Russian language skills increase probability of employment by about 6 (males) and 9 (females) percentage points. Our results bear important implications for the ongoing debates on language policies in the post-Soviet countries

Can state language policies distort students' demand for education?

We exploit a recent natural experiment in Ukraine's school system to study how stricter requirements for proficiency in the state language affect linguistic minority students' demand for education. The reform obligated linguistic minority students to take a standardized school exit test in Ukrainian, thus denying them access to translated versions of the test. We study the implications of this reform for students in schools with Hungarian and Romanian/Moldovan languages of instruction. Using school-level data and employing difference-in-difference estimation techniques, we find that the reform resulted in a decline in the number of subjects taken by minority students. They particularly withdrew from linguistically-demanding subjects such as History and Biology, taking more Math instead. Given the implications for minority students' fields of future study, the reform may have affected their educational outcomes in a distortive way