Marta Martínez-Matute

Credit, Crisis and Contract Enforcement: Evidence from the Spanish Loan Market

Numerosos estudios, tanto teoricos como empiricos, han puesto de manifiesto que la calidad del marco institucional tiene efectos sobre el funcionamiento del mercado de credito. Una cuestion menos tratada por la literatura ha sido el efecto que tiene sobre el desarrollo de este mercado el diseno de los distintos procedimientos judiciales de un pais y su interaccion con el ciclo economico. Este articulo pretende cubrir ese espacio, mostrando como las diferencias provinciales en Espana en cuanto a la disponibilidad de credito y la morosidad pueden ser explicadas en parte por diferencias en la eficacia del sistema judicial, ya sea en los periodos de crecimiento sostenido (2001-2007) como en los de recesion (desde 2008). Las conclusiones indican que una mejora de la eficacia de las ejecuciones judiciales (cuando un juez obliga forzosamente al pago de una deuda) incrementa la disponibilidad de credito en Espana. Sin embargo, la eficacia de la fase declarativa del procedimiento (cuando la existencia de una deuda es verificada por un juez) no parece tener un efecto significativo sobre el credito. Una posible explicacion de esta observacion es que una proporcion importante de los impagos son estrategicos (es decir, realizados por deudores que son, en realidad, solventes). En paralelo, se observa una menor morosidad en las provincias en las que los procesos declarativos son mas eficaces. Esta ultima observacion es significativa solamente despues del inicio de la Gran Recesion de 2008 y podria estar relacionada con el incremento de los impagos no estrategicos que se produce durante las crisis economicas.

Education, Labour Market Experience and Cognitive Skills: Evidence from PIAAC

We study how formal education and experience in the labour market correlate with measures of human capital available in thirteen countries participating in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC), an international study assessing adults’ proficiency in numeracy and literacy. Two findings are consistent with the notion that, in producing human capital, work experience is a substitute for formal education for respondents with compulsory schooling. Firstly, the number of years of working experience correlates with performance in PIAAC mostly among low-educated individuals. Secondly, individual fixed-effect models suggest that workers in jobs intensive in numerical tasks – relative to reading tasks – perform relatively better in the numeracy section of the PIAAC test than in the reading part. The results are driven by young individuals with low levels of schooling and hold mainly for simple tasks, suggesting that our findings are not fully generated by the sorting of workers across jobs. A back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that the contribution of on-the-job learning to skill formation is a quarter of that of compulsory schooling in the countries we analyse.

Employment protection legislation and labor court activity in Spain

Labor courts may introduce a significant wedge between “legal” firing costs and “effective” (post-trial) firing costs. Apart from procedural costs, there is uncertainty over judges’ rulings, in particular over the likelihood of a “fair” dismissal ultimately being ruled as “unfair”, which may increase firing costs significantly. In 2010 and 2012, reforms of Employment Protection Legislation widened the definition of fair economic dismissals in Spain. In this paper we look at Labor Court rulings on dismissals across Spanish provinces before and after the EPL reforms (2004-2014). We make this comparison taking into account a set of co-variates (local labor market conditions, characteristics of the Labor Courts, pre-trial conciliations, congestion of Labor Courts) which may determine the selection of dismissal cases ruled by Labor Courts. Our results suggest that, despite the 2010 and 2012 EPL reforms, the proportion of economic redundancies being ruled as fair by Labor Courts has not substantially increased, although it is now less negatively associated with the local unemployment rate than in the pre-reform period.