Arantza Gorostiaga

Should fiscal policy be different in a non-competitive framework?

Published as an article in: Journal of Monetary Economics, 2003, vol. 50, issue 6, pages 1311-1331.

Fiscal Policy and Minimum Wage for Redistribution: An Equivalence Result

In this paper we derive conditions under which a minimum wage law combined with anonymous taxes and transfers and an agent-specific tax-transfer scheme are equivalent redistribution policies.

On the use of conventional and statistical-learning techniques for the analysis of PISA results in Spain

A simple and general feature extraction procedure is presented which provides robust nonparametric estimates on the statistical relevance of data features, by computing the confidence intervals for the model weights in the case of linear models, and for the change in the error rate when removing each feature in the case of nonlinear models. The method performance is specially scrutinized for the prediction of the 2009 PISA scores of the Spanish students. We compare the ability of logistic regression, Fisher linear discriminant analysis, and Support Vector Machine (SVM, both with linear and with nonlinear kernel), to classify top performers in the mathematics exam. All the methods yield similar accuracy, with linear and nonlinear SVM providing improved feature reduction capabilities, at the expense of computational complexity. The results show relevant relationships of the success rate with regional variables, computer availability, gender, immigration status, learning strategies, and some others. The proposed feature selection procedure for machine learning classification can be readily used in other fields, and it can be improved with further theoretical and probabilistic development.

Optimal Minimum Wage in a Competitive Economy

This paper studies the use of a minimum wage law to implement the optimal redistribution policy when a distorting tax-transfer scheme is also available. The authors build a static general equilibrium model with a Ramsey planner making decisions on taxes, transfers, and minimum wage levels. Workers are assumed to differ only in their productivity. The authors find that optimal redistribution may imply the use of only taxes and transfers, only a minimum wage, or the proper combination of both policies. The key factor driving their results is the reaction of the demand for low-skilled labor to the minimum wage law. Hence, an optimal minimum wage appears to be most likely when low-skilled households are scarce, the complementarity between the two types of workers is large, or the difference in productivity is small.