Job loss at home: children’s school performanceduring the Great Recession in Spain

This paper studies the effect of parental job loss on children's school performance during the Great Recession in Spain, using an original panel dataset for students observed since the beginning of the crisis in a school in the province of Barcelona. By using fixed effects, this paper is more likely to deal with the problem of selection into troubled firms which is prevalent in the literature. Fixed effect estimates show that students experience a negative and significant decrease on average grades of about 13% of a standard deviation after father's job loss. The impact of paternal job loss is not homogeneous across students, but it is largely concentrated among children whose fathers suffer long unemployment spells after job loss and students in already disadvantaged families in terms of the father's education level. These results suggest that paternal job loss is a mechanism through which further inequalities might develop during and after a deep economic crisis

Intergenerational effects of employment protection reforms

Job insecurity has worsened in most OECD countries in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Using Labour Force Survey data, I estimate the link between parental job insecurity (as measured by the contract type held by parents) and children's school related outcomes. Endogeneity issues affecting the type of contract held by parents are dealt with by constructing an instrument based on regional, time and demographic variation in the amount of wage subsidies available to firms to convert fixed-term contracts into permanent ones in Spain. The findings suggest that children whose fathers are less job insecure are considerably more likely to graduate from compulsory education on time. They are also less likely to drop out of the education system and be classified as Not in Education, Employment or Training at age sixteen. Employment protection reforms that liberalise the use of fixed-term contracts and do not take into account these negative externalities on other members of the household are therefore understating their overall cost

Job loss at home: children’s school performance during the Great Recession

This paper studies the intergenerational impact of parental job loss on school performance during the Great Recession in Spain. Collecting data through parental surveys in a school in the province of Barcelona, I obtain information about the parental labour market status before and after the Great Recession. I can then link this information to repeated information on their children’s school performance, for a sample of over 300 students. Using individual fixed effects, the estimates show a negative and significant decrease on average grades of around 15% of a standard deviation after father’s job loss. These results are mainly driven by those students whose fathers suffer long unemployment spells. In contrast, the average impact of mother’s job loss on school performance is close to zero and non-significant. The decline in school performance during the Great Recession after father’s job loss, particularly among disadvantaged students, could result in detrimental long-term effects that might contribute to increased inequality. This could be an important and underemphasised cost of recessions

Work and children in Spain: challenges and opportunities for equality between men and women

Over the past decades, Spain has seen a striking convergence between women's and men's participation in the labour market. However, this convergence has stalled since the early 2010s.We show that women still fare worse in several important labour market dimensions. Gender inequalities are further aggravated among people with children. Women with children under 16 are much more likely to be unemployed, work parttime or on temporary contracts than men with children of the same age. We show that it is unlikely that preferences alone can account for these gaps. A review of the evidence shows that family policies, such as paternity leave expansions, financial incentives in the form of tax credits for working mothers and subsidised or free childcare for very young children, could help reduce the motherhood penalty. However, such policies are likely to be more effective if combined with advances in breaking up traditional gender roles

Has concentration evolved similarly in manufacturing and services? A sensitivity analysis.

Our first objective is to compare the degree of concentration in manufacturing and services, with special emphasis on its evolution in these two sectors, using a sensitivity analysis for different concentration indices and different geographic units of analysis: municipalities and local labour systems of Catalonia in 1991 and 2001. Most concentration measures fail to consider the space in which a particular municipality is located. Our second objective is to overcome this problem by applying two different techniques: by using a clustering measure, and by analysing whether the location quotients computed for each municipality and sector present some kind of spatial autocorrelation process. We take special account of the differences in patterns of concentration according to the technological level of the sectors.Geographic concentration, Manufacturing, Services, Local Labour Systems, Spatial Econometrics.

Concentration of the Economic Activity: Comparing Methodologies and Geographic Units

Despite the important role of the service sector in the economic activity, the majority of the studies, both at international and at the Spanish level, have focused their attention in determining the degree of concentration of the manufacture sector. The main purpose in this article is to analyze the concentration and the location pattern both of the manufacturing and the service sectors in Catalonia using different methodologies proposed in the economic literature, such as the Ellison&Glaeser index (1997) or the methodology used by O’Donoghue and Gleave (2004), among others. The calculation of the different indices using the municipalities of Catalonia as the geographic unit of the analysis allows us to make a comparison of the results between indices, and also to compare the location pattern and the degree of concentration of the manufacturing and service sectors. Moreover, the results that we obtain for Catalonia are compared with those obtained for other economies (United States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, etc.). In a second step, we re-calculate these indices using as the geographic unit the local labour systems of Catalonia instead of the municipalities. The election of these two kind of geographic units is motivated thanks to the ongoing debate about what is the ideal geographic unit when analyzing the concentration of economic activity (Duranton and Overman (2006, forthcoming) and Marcon and Puech (2003), at the international level and Viladecans (2004), at the Spanish level). Using local labour systems will overcome the problem of working with geographic units based on administrative borders, like municipalities, that are not based in real economic areas. The calculation of these indices for the two kind of geographic units allows us to compare the results for the two areas. Once we have calculated these indices, we use the techniques of the Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis in order to study the geographic distribution of the concentration of the economic activity. Finally, in order to perform a more in-depth analysis of the relationships among different sectors, we use the Porter (2003) methodology to define clusters of activity.

Uncovering the association between school qualifications and youth custody

Youth custody has severe long-term consequences for detained young people. Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela investigate the relationship between GCSE qualifications and youth custody, and find that underlying problems become evident in early adolescence

Entry through the narrow door: the costs of just failing high stakes exams

In many countries, important thresholds in examinations act as a gateway to higher levels of education and/or improved employment prospects. This paper examines the consequences of just failing a particularly important high stakes national examination taken at the end of compulsory schooling in England. It uses unique administrative data, including full information on both initial and regraded exam marks, to show that students of the same ability have significantly different educational trajectories depending on whether they just pass or fail this exam. Three years later, students who just fail to achieve the required threshold have a lower probability of entering an upper-secondary high-level academic or vocational track and of starting tertiary education. Those who fail to pass the threshold are also more likely to drop out of education by age 18, without some form of employment. The moderately high effects of just passing or failing to pass the threshold in this high-stakes exam has high potential long- term consequences for those affecte

Has concentration evolved similarly in manufacturing and services? A sensitivity analysis

Our first objective is to compare the degree of concentration in manufacturing and services, with special emphasis on its evolution in these two sectors, using a sensitivity analysis for different concentration indices and different geographic units of analysis: municipalities and local labour systems of Catalonia in 1991 and 2001. Most concentration measures fail to consider the space in which a particular municipality is located. Our second objective is to overcome this problem by applying two different techniques: by using a clustering measure, and by analysing whether the location quotients computed for each municipality and sector present some kind of spatial autocorrelation process. We take special account of the differences in patterns of concentration according to the technological level of the sectors

Where versus What: College Value-Added and Returns to Field of Study in Further Education

We use administrative records on educational and labor market trajectories to estimate the value-added of English further education colleges in terms of educational and labor market outcomes and earnings returns to different fields of study taught at these colleges. We find that dispersion in college value-added in terms of labor market outcomes is moderate compared to differences in earnings returns across fields of study. We further show that value-added in labor market outcomes is correlated with value-added in academic outcomes. We conclude that in English further education, what one studies tends to matter more than where one does so