Putting health in all policies: The National Institute for Welfare Enhancement

Welfare is a rather vague term whose meaning depends on ideology, values and judgments. Material resources are just means to enhance people’s well-being, but growth of the Gross Domestic Production is still the standard measure of the success of a society. Fortunately, recent advances in measuring social performance include health, education and other social outcomes. Because “what we measure affects what we do” it is hoped that social policies will change. The movement Health in all policies and its associated Health Impact Assessment methodology will contribute to it. The task consists of designing transversal policies that consider health and other welfare goals, the short term and long-term implications and intergenerational redistributions of resources. As long as marginal productivity on health outside the healthcare system is higher than inside it, efficiency needs cross-sectoral policies. And fairness needs them even more, because in order to reduce social inequalities in health, a wide social and political response is needed. Unless we reduce the well-documented inefficiencies in our current health care systems the welfare states will fail to consolidate and the overall economic wellbeing could be in serious trouble. In this article we sketched some policy solutions such as pricing according to net benefits of innovation and public encouragement of radical innovation besides the small type incremental and market-led innovation. We proposed an independent agency, the National Institute for Welfare Enhancement to guarantee long term fair and efficient social policies in which health plays a central role.Public health policies; Health Impact Assessment; Welfare; Health in All Policies.

Essays on firm dynamics

There is a growing interest among macroeconomists in incorporating explicit heterogeneity into macroeconomic models, allowing to bring in micro data to discipline them. In this way, we can understand how shocks or policies impact differently these heterogeneous agents and their macroeconomic implications, which sometimes might differ from those obtained using a representative agent model. My dissertation consists of two main chapters that attempt to understand the impact of changes in the economic environment, with a special focus on taxes, on heterogeneous firms’ investment and growth decision, the firm size distribution of firms, and ultimately their impact on macroeconomic aggregates. In the first chapter, ‘Taxation and the Life Cycle of Firms ’, co-authored with Andrés Erosa, we extend the Hopenhayn and Rogerson (1993) framework to understand how different forms of taxing capital income affect firms’ investment and financial policies over their life cycle. Relative to dividends and capital gains taxation, corporate income taxation slows down firm growth over the life cycle by reducing after-tax profits available for reinvesting. It also diminishes entry by negatively affecting the value of entrants relative to that of incumbent firms. After a tax reform eliminating the corporate income tax in a revenue neutral way, output and capital increase by 12% and 32%. The large response of firm entry is crucial for these results. In the second chapter, ‘Macroeconomics, Firms Dynamics and IPOs’, I study how changes in the economic environment witnessed in the US in the last decades regarding taxes, access to credit and idiosyncratic productivity shock process impact firms’ choices. I argue these changes might impact differently privately held and publicly traded firms, having therefore implications for the endogenous decision to become public (IPO) and their macroeconomic consequences. I extend a model of firm dynamics with private and publicly traded firms, where I explicitly model the going public decision. Firms are born private, grow by reinvesting profits and/or borrowing, and can eventually do an IPO and become public. Being public, firms can access to costly equity financing, but have to pay an ongoing cost of operation. I calibrate the model to the US, and study how the observed changes in the last decades of taxes, equity issuance costs, the costs of being public, access to credit and idiosyncratic shock process impact a) changes in selection into public (IPO); b) firms’ policies; and c) macroeconomic aggregates. I find the decrease in corporate and dividend taxes in the 1990s contributes to the increase in share of public firms, and the changes in firms’ policies observed in the data, having a larger impact than changes in equity issuance costs. An increase in the cost of being public is at odds with the changes in selection into public and firms’ policies observed in the data during the 2000s, and so is an increase access to credit. Changes in the idiosyncratic shock process can reconcile some of the trends in behaviour and selection of publicly traded firms, and have important macroeconomic implications.Programa de Doctorado en Economía por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Andrea Caggese ; Secretario: Emircan Yurdagul ; Vocal: Josep Pijoan Ma

Taxation and the life cycle of firms

The Hopenhayn and Rogerson (1993) framework is extended to understand how different forms of taxing capital income affect firms' investment and financial policies over their life cycle. Relative to dividends and capital gains taxation, corporate income taxation slows down firm growth over the life cycle by reducing after-tax profits available for reinvesting. It also diminishes entry by negatively affecting the value of entrants relative to that of incumbent firms. After a tax reform eliminating the corporate income tax in a revenue neutral way, output and capital increase by 12% and 32%. The large response of firm entry is crucial.Erosa acknowledges financial support from the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of Spain (grants ECO2015-68615-P and MDM 2014-0431) and Comunidad de Madrid, MadEco-CM (S2015/HUM-3444). Erosa also acknowledges financial support from the Banco de España. González gratefully acknowledges support from Fundación La Caixa (ID 100010434), grant number LCF/BQ/ES15/1036000

Género y estado de bienestar : la feminización de la atención a la dependencia

Los sistemas sanitarios han asumido de manera tradicional gran parte del coste de la atención sanitaria mediante sistemas de cobertura universal financiados con impuestos o cotizaciones de la Seguridad Social y, de manera indirecta, una parte de los cuidados personales. A su vez, los cuidados personales son, sobre todo en los países del Sur de Europa, responsabilidad de la familia y, en particular, de la mujer. La naturaleza familiar de los cuidados personales ha sido una característica básica de la mayoría de los sistemas de cuidados personales. El presente trabajo presenta algunos de las conclusiones de una investigación sobre la dependencia en municipios extremeños de menos de 5000 habitantes, en concreto, las relativas al perfil de las personas cuidadoras. La investigación pone de manifiesto su feminización que se enmarca en un modelo asistencial familiarista que refuerza los roles tradicionales de mujeres y hombres en el hogar

Polynomial volume estimation and its applications

Given a compact set S ⊂ R d we consider the problem of estimating, from a random sample of points, the Lebesgue measure of S, µ(S), and its boundary measure, L(S) (as defined by the Minkowski content of ∂S). This topic has received some attention, especially in the two-dimensional case d = 2, motivated by applications in image analysis. A new method to simultaneously estimate µ(S) and L(S) from a sample of points inside S is proposed. The basic idea is to assume that S has a polynomial volume, that is, that V (r) := µ{x : d(x, S) ≤ r} is a polynomial in r of degree d, for all r in some interval [0, R). We develop a minimum distance approach to estimate the coefficients of V (r) and, in particular µ(S) and L(S), which correspond, respectively, to the independent term and the first degree coefficient of V (r). The strong consistency of the proposed estimators is proved. Some numerical illustrations are givenThis work has been partially supported by Spanish Grants MTM2016-78751-P (A. Cuevas) and MTM2016-76969-P (B. Pateiro-López)S

Proyecto IVAPTA, estudio y conocimiento de alteraciones en pintura sobre tela. La realidad aumentada aplicada a la conservación

IVAPTA, uno de los diez proyectos escogidos en el II Plan Propio de Docencia de la Universidad de Sevilla para su desarrollo. Este proyecto se centra en recopilar, clasificar y poner a disposición de docentes, profesionales o sociedad en general, de forma fácil, amena, novedosa e inmediata, información de calidad sobre los indicadores visuales de alteración presentes en una pintura sobre tela. Lo consigue mediante una aplicación móvil de fácil descarga que nos acerca visualmente las alteraciones de la pieza para poder evaluar el nivel de riesgo que estas representan para la integridad del bien. Te mostramos cómo acceder al recurso; solo necesitas un dispositivo electrónico