Traffic accidents are a major public health concern since they are the leading cause of death for those aged 15–29 years and the ninth cause of death worldwide. In this paper, we estimate the overall effect on traffic fatalities of the introduction of the Penalty Point System (PPS) in Spain in 2006, jointly with those of the publicity campaigns that went with it and the reform of the Penal Code to toughen the consequences of traffic offenses in 2007. We use a synthetic-control method that controls for differences in the distribution of control variables, changing business cycles conditions, the effect of unexpected policies or events that happen between the pre- and the post-PPS periods and the arbitrariness in the selection of the control group. We find that the introduction of the PPS and related initiatives lead to a reduction of almost 15% in traffic fatality rates in Spain during the first two years. The magnitude of the estimated effect monotonically increased over time until reaching a 40% reduction in fatality rates in 2009 and 2010. 

Traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for those aged 15–29 years and the ninth cause of death worldwide. Personality traits play an important role in explaining traffic crashes. We use data from the British Cohort Study 1970 to analyse the effect of the respondent's personality traits at age 10 on the probability of having had at least one injurious traffic crash at age 30. Our results support the hypothesis on the long-run associations between personality traits in childhood and injurious road crashes in adulthood, but only for men. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in the level of conscientiousness at age 10 would lower men's likelihood of having at least one injurious traffic crash by approximately 3 percentage points. The association found in this paper may suggest that improving personality traits through educational programs could lower traffic crashes and risky driving behaviours. 

Breastfeeding is essential both for the health of mothers and the health and development of newborns but is rarely considered as an economic issue and remains economically invisible. In addition to the improved wellbeing of mothers and their infants, breastfeeding can positively impact society as a whole and should therefore be better defined in public policies. Thus, strategies aimed at increasing exclusive breastfeeding rates would likely contribute to lowering the fiscal burden of the Spanish National Health System. Moreover, the magnitude of these potential benefits suggests that such policies would likely be socially cost–effective. 

Traffic accidents are both a major economic and public health problem worldwide. We use data from the May 2016 Spanish barometer (n = 1632) to analyse the characteristics of drivers who declare different types of risky driving behaviours. Our estimates suggest that the likelihood of being a high-risk driver in Spain increases with educational attainment and decreases with age. Moreover, it is higher for those with previous sanctions and for men, particularly so regarding speeding and driving after drinking alcohol. These results suggest that prevention policies in Spain should be targeted to different collectives of drivers depending on the particular risky behaviour considered. 

Policy debates in education are greatly influenced by international differences in test scores. The presumption is that differences in test scores reflect differences in cognitive skills and content knowledge. We challenge this presumption by studying how much of the variation in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores is associated with student effort. We build a number of measures of student effort on the basis of both the PISA test and the student survey. Together, our measures of student effort explain between 32 and 38 percent of the variation in test scores across countries. 

We use information on second-generation migrants to study the existence of a cultural component on the formation process of noncognitive skills and its effect on education and employment outcomes. Our measures of noncognitive skills include: personality traits that children are encouraged to learn at home and inherited civic capital. Individuals whose cultural heritage places a relatively higher value to independence and, in comparison, a relative lower value on child qualities positively associated with the conscientiousness personality factor, i.e. hard work and thrift, report lower education, worse occupational status and lower wages on average. Individuals with a higher inherited civic capital declare a higher educational level, but we find no effect of inherited civic capital on adult labor market outcomes.

This paper examines how particular teaching and learning strategies are related to student performance on specific PISA test questions, particularly mathematics questions. The report compares teacher-directed instruction and memorisation learning strategies, at the traditional ends of the teaching and learning spectrums, and student-oriented instruction and elaboration learning strategies, at the opposite ends. Other teaching strategies, such as formative assessment and cognitive activation, and learning approaches, such as control strategies, are also analysed. Our analyses suggest that to perform at the top, students cannot rely on memory alone; they need to approach mathematics strategically and creatively to succeed in the most complex problems. There is also some evidence that most teaching strategies have a role to play in the classroom. To varying degrees, students need to learn from teachers, be informed about their progress and work independently and collaboratively; above all, they need to be constantly challenged.

This article investigates the association between the availability of childcare and low geographical mobility in southern Europe where, the author argues, couples that have or plan to have children live close to their parents in order to reconcile work and family life by taking advantage of their mothers' low labour force participation rate. He presents a behavioural model showing couples' fertility, female employment and mobility decisions, and tests the model's predictions using ECHP data. The deterrent effect of a woman working on the couple's mobility is found to be significant only for couples who have children and live in southern Europe.

We analyze whether country differences in the noncognitive skills or qualities that children are encouraged to learn at home, i.e. differences in culture, account for country differences in student performance. We do so by comparing PISA language, mathematics and science scores of second-generation immigrants of different origins living in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland. We use the valuation of different child qualities in the student’s country of ancestry by mid 1980s to approximate students’ cultural heritage. Our estimates suggest that culture plays a prominent role in explaining variation in 15-years-old scholastic performance. A one-standard-deviation increase in our cultural variable accounts to between 10% and 30% of the standard deviation of student performance across ancestries depending on the host country considered. We find that the intergenerational transmission of some child qualities positively related to the conscientiousness personality factor like hard work, responsibility, perseverance and thrift favors the acquisition of cognition as measured by achievement test. A similar result is obtained for the child qualities independence and imagination.

This paper analyzes the evaluation of the relative performance of a set of groups when their outcomes are defined in terms of categorical data and the groups’ members are heterogeneous. This type of problem has been dealt with in Herrero and Villar (2013) for the case of a homogeneous population. Here we expand their model controlling for heterogeneity by means of inverse probability weighting techniques. We apply this extended model to the analysis of the scholastic performance of fifteen-year-old students in the OECD countries, using the data in the PISA. We evaluate the relative performance of the different countries out of the distribution of the students’ achievements across the different levels of competence, controlling by the students’ characteristics (explanatory variables regarding schooling and family environment). We find that differences in mathematical and reading abilities across OECD countries would lower by between 40% and 50% if the students’ characteristics would be those for the OECD average. 

Between 1998 and 2008, the immigrant share in Spain jumped from less than 3 % to more than 13 %. We provide bounds on the effect of immigration inflows on natives’ election outcomes by considering alternative assumptions about nationalized immigrants’ participation rates and voting behavior. We find that Latin-American immigration increased natives’ participation rate and their support for the major leftist party (Socialist Workers’ Party) over the major conservative party (People’s Party (PP)). Conversely, African immigration only increased natives’ support for anti-immigration formations relative to the PP while leaving unaffected their participation rate. The estimated effects are of modest size in all cases. We provide suggestive evidence that economic factors cannot account for such a heterogeneity in the effects of interest by immigrants’ ethnic groups. We argue that Spanish natives’ attitudes towards immigrants are mainly driven by noneconomic factors like dissimilarities between natives and immigrants in language, religion, and race.

This paper aims to examine whether life satisfaction and health-related quality of life (HRQoL) are simultaneously related, as well as to quantify the bias that occurs if simultaneity is not accounted for. The study sample consisted of 870 respondents, representative of the Spanish adult general population. Using a simultaneous equations system —with the satisfaction with life scale (SWLS) and the SF-6D index as outcome variables—, we found a simultaneous association between life satisfaction and HRQoL, although this relationship is heterogeneous in individual characteristics such as age and sex. More important, the fact of estimating the relationship between life satisfaction and HRQoL under a unidirectional approach severely underestimates the effect of life satisfaction on HRQoL and, to a lesser degree, the reverse direction effect. In consequence, policy decisions intended to improve satisfaction with life or HRQoL can be wrong if they rely on unidirectional estimates. Another relevant implication of this research is that, as a result of the simultaneous relationship between life satisfaction and HRQoL, not only health interventions may increase satisfaction with life, but also policies that improve life satisfaction can lead to positive side effects on HRQoL. 

This paper analyzes whether the two major labor market reforms implemented in Spain in the 1990s to reduce the share of temporary employment succeed in promoting flows into permanent employment. The 1994 reform severely restricted temporary contracts and the 1997 reform introduced a new permanent contract figure with lower payroll taxes and dismissal costs than the ordinary. To evaluate these non-targeted treatments I present an estimation procedure that uses pre-treatment outcomes to predict the one that would have been otherwise observed in the post-treatment period in the absence of the treatment and I derive its large sample properties. Using data from the Spanish Labor Force Survey I find that both reforms failed at reducing the share of temporary employment because they had no impact on contract conversions, which account for most new permanent contracts. The 1997 reform succeed in increasing permanent hirings for some groups of workers. My findings suggest that Spanish employers took advantage of wage and dismissal cost reductions to substitute permanent contracts for otherwise temporary ones.

This paper presents a new scoring algorithm for the SF-6D, one of the most popular preference-based health status measures. Previous algorithms suffer from a phenomenon called the floor effect (i.e., lack of sensitivity of the instrument for detecting health gains of individuals whose baseline health is poor). Our algorithm expands the range ofutility scores in such a way that the „floor‟ effect vanishes. We get such a wider range thanks to the use of a lottery equivalent method through which preferences from a representative sample of Spanish general population are elicited.

This paper analyzes the role of financial resources, formal education, and other factors in explaining the presence and spread of rural credit cooperatives (RCCs) across Spanish provinces in the first third of the twentieth century. We first provide descriptive evidence on the evolution of RCCs and their financial activity. Then, we use panel data techniques to analyze the empirical validity of the potential determinants that we have collected. We find a negative correlation between the male illiteracy rate and both the presence of cooperatives and their credit activity. Additionally, we find that cooperatives and public granaries were likely to be located in the same provinces. The cooperatives located in the richest provinces were granted access to external funding and, in particular, to the funds provided by the Banco de España (Bank of Spain). Our estimates attest that the funds obtained from their members were far more relevant than the external funds in accounting for both the number of cooperatives and their credit activity.

This paper presents a novel approach to model health state valuations using inverse probability weighting techniques. Our approach makes no assumption on the distribution of health state values, accommodates covariates in a flexible way, eschews parametric assumptions on the relationship between the outcome and the covariates, allows for an undetermined amount of heterogeneity in the estimates and it formally tests and corrects for sample selection biases. The proposed model is semi-parametrically estimated and it is illustrated with health state valuation data collected for Spain using the SF-6D descriptive system. Estimation results indicate that the standard regression model underestimates the utility loss that the Spanish general population assigns to departures from full health, particularly so for severe departures. 

Este trabajo analiza qué información puede proporcionar el método de los salarios hedónicos sobre el Valor EstadÌstico de la Vida (VEV) en España. La excesiva variación temporal de los valores estimados, la endogeneidad de los riesgos y la ausencia de instrumentos adecuados cuestionan la validez de las estimaciones de sección cruzada. Por su parte, el VEV estimado con datos de panel no es válido para el conjunto de asalariados al ser identificado por los cambios voluntarios de empleo, lo que introduce un sesgo de selección. Las estimaciones más fiables son las que acotan el VEV, situándolo entre 2.8 y 8.3 millones de euros.

This paper explores biases in the elicitation of utilities under risk and the contribution that generalizations of expected utility can make to the resolution of these biases. We used five methods to measure utilities under risk and found clear violations of expected utility. Of the theories studies, prospect theory was most consistent with our data. The main improvement of prospect theory over expected utility was in comparisons between a riskless and a risky prospect(riskless-risk methods). We observed no improvement over expected utility in comparisons between two risky prospects (risk-risk methods). An explanation why we found no improvement of prospect theory over expected utility in risk-risk methods may be that there was less overweighting of small probabilities in our study than has commonly been observed. 

This paper presents a test of the predictive validity of various classes of QALY models (i.e. linear, power and exponential models). We first estimated TTO utilities for 43 EQ-5D chronic health states and next these states were embedded in nonchronic health profiles. The chronic TTO utilities were then used to predict the responses to TTO questions with nonchronic health profiles. We find that the power QALY model clearly outperforms linear and exponential QALY models. Optimal power coefficient is 0.65. Our results suggest that TTO-based QALY calculations may be biased. This bias can be corrected using a power QALY model.

La corrección del sesgo de selección muestral en la estimación de ecuaciones salariales y el correcto tratamiento de los términos de co- rrección reduce los porcentajes de discriminación salarial por sexo habitualmente obtenidos en los análisis de corte transversal. Propo- nemos un nuevo método para descomponer las diferencias salariales observadas entre hombres y mujeres basado en la correcta descom- posición de los términos de corrección, y realizamos una aplicación en catorce países de la UE que constituye la primera comparación homogénea del tema porque descompone dichos términos de corrección en los componentes habituales (características y remuneraciones). 

This paper presents a test of the predictive validity of various classes of QALY models (i.e., linear, power and exponential models). We first estimated TTO utilities for 43 EQ-5D chronic health states and next these states were embedded in health profiles. The chronic TTO utilities were then used to predict the responses to TTO questions with health profiles. We find that the power QALY model clearly outperforms linear and exponential QALY models. Optimal power coefficient is 0.65. Our results suggest that TTO-based QALY calculations may be biased. This bias can be avoided using a power QALY model.