Emilio Congregado

• Professor of Economics
• Full Professor at University of Huelva

Purpose This study aims to revisit the relationship between the stringency of employment protection legislation and entrepreneurship at the macro-level using time series data from 28 OECD countries. Design/methodology/approach To address model uncertainty, a Bayesian model averaging methodology is employed, overcoming issues related to predictor s...

Understanding the worldwide drivers of qualified entrepreneurship is a key issue in economic policy design. To help policy decisions exert their intended impact, we aim to cluster a wide range of countries on the basis of their levels and trends in self-employment productivity using a finite mixture model applied to a new large dataset of 121 count...

Is precarity inherent to employment when it is mediated by a digital platform, or does employment precarity have other causes? Using the first wave of the European survey on collaborative economy and employment (COLLEEM, hereinafter), we identify different types of precarity among platform workers by using different operationalizations of this phen...

In this paper, we test the persistence of involuntary part-time employment, making use of large historical series for the US and UK. We adopted a comprehensive macro-econometric approach, based on a battery of panel and time series unit root and stationarity tests, also allowing for flexible specifications as fractional integration and structural b...

Understanding the worldwide drivers of qualified entrepreneurship is a key issue in economic policy design. To help policy decisions exert their intended impact, we aim to cluster a wide range of countries on the basis of their levels and trends in self-employment productivity using a finite mixture model applied to a new large dataset of 121 count...

This paper presents an average treatment effect analysis of Spain’s furlough program during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using 2020 labour force quarterly microdata, we construct a counterfactual made of comparable nonfurloughed individuals who lost their jobs and apply propensity score matching based on their pretreatment characteristics. O...

We test sustainability of the Italian government deficit over the period 1861–2020 using the fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL). This approach takes into account monetary and fiscal policy interactions and assumes that fiscal policy may determine the price level even if monetary authorities pursue an inflation-targeting strategy. We consider a...

Most representative decision-tree ensemble methods have been used to examine the variable importance of Treasury term spreads to predict US economic recessions with a balance of generating rules for US economic recession detection. A strategy is proposed for training the classifiers with Treasury term spreads data and the results are compared in or...

Most representative decision tree ensemble methods have been used to examine the variable importance of Treasury term spreads to predict US economic recessions with a balance of generating rules for US economic recession detection. A strategy is proposed for training the classifiers with Treasury term spreads data and the results are compared in or...

In this article, we test a classical model of inflation with rational expectations for the case of Spain during the period 1830–1998. The principal testable implication is that money growth and inflation are cointegrated ruling out speculative bubbles. First, to detect episodes of potential explosive behaviour in the Spanish inflation rate, we use...

Research background: We analyse the added worker effect (AWE) and the discouraged worker effect (DWE) from an aggregate perspective. The first effect refers to an increase in labour force participation in response to a decrease in the wage rate. The second effect refers to the decision by workers who have been unsuccessful in their job search to le...

We study the long-run relationship between unemployment and the labour force participation rate while accounting for potential non-linearities. We explore two sources of non-linearities: structural breaks (as we allow the relationship to be time-varying) and differences by gender groups. We apply a novel approach, as we extend the cointegration ana...

Inactive individuals represent a pool of potential labour whose activation entails economic and social advantages. Additionally, being active allows individuals to cover their basic psychological needs—autonomy, competence and relatedness—which leads to greater satisfaction through self-determination. We posit that self-employment may be an attract...

A growing body of empirical literature—both on the micro and macro scale—is devoted to exploring the existence of hysteresis—or at least persistence—in self-employment, i.e., whether policy, economic or external shocks have transitory or persistent effects on the probability of survival, and in turn, on the natural rate of self-employment. In aggre...

Although trademarks are the most widely used form of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) by firms across all economic sectors worldwide, this indicator is a much less exploited information resource in empirical analysis compared with patents. Our work addresses this gap by investigating the relationship between trademark registration and entreprene...

We examine whether discouraged and added worker effects are state-dependent, business cycle phase-dependent, or change stochastically. We use quarterly LFS data for the 1995–2016 period for Poland. Labor force participation rate behaves non-linearly. The change is rapid and connected to the stable value of the cyclical unemployment rate. An unemplo...

This paper provides estimates of the elasticity of substitution between operational and managerial jobs in the US economy during the years 1969–2014, derived from an aggregate CES production function. Estimating the long-term relationship between (the log of) the aggregate employment/self-employment ratio and (the log of) the returns from paid-empl...

This paper provides estimates of the elasticity of substitution between operational and managerial jobs in the US economy covering a period of almost five decades, derived from an aggregate CES production function. Estimating the long-term relationship between (the log of) the aggregate employment/self-employment ratio and (the log of) the returns...

This article applies a recent econometric framework to the analysis of the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in the US, which allows a joint study of causality and persistence. We provide evidence suggesting a nonlinear relationship with a structural break. In the most recent regime, we find that GDP causes energy consumpt...

In this paper we test the hypothesis of convergence in a set of twelve of the main tourism source markets of Spain over a time period that ranges from January 2000 to September 2015. We analyse the potential convergence by following an econometric strategy consisting of three different methodologies. Firstly, we test for the presence of full conver...

In this paper, we analyze the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve as reported by Kuznets (Am Econ Rev 5:1–28, 1955) by using the methodology proposed by Kejriwal and Perron (J Econ 146:59–73, 2008, J Bus Econ Stat 28:503–522, 2010) and applying Jaunky’s (Energy Policy 39(3):1228–1240, 2011) specification using quarterly data from 1973:1 to...

This study aims to improve our understanding of overqualification by incorporating distinctions in employment status (i.e., self-employed workers, private employees and public employees) in the analysis of the incidence, effects, dynamics and routes out of overqualification. To this end, we apply discrete choice –ordered and non-ordered– and count...

En el presente trabajo, se muestra una aplicación haciendo uso de la hoja de cálculo EXCEL del modelo de oferta y demanda dinámico. La impartición de la asignatura de macroeconomía en los primeros cursos de los grados de ADE y Economía, así como el escaso bagaje matemático y de programación de dichos alumnos en esos cursos, hace que el profesor, a...

Many regional development policy initiatives assume that entrepreneurial activities promote economic growth. Empirical research has presented rationale for this argument showing that small firms create proportionally more new jobs than large firms. However, little research has been performed on the issue of net job generation at the urban level, pa...

In this article, we study if the ‘recession-push’ hypothesis, i.e. the relationship running from unemployment to entrepreneurship/self-employment is affected asymmetrically by country dynamic labor market conditions. To this end, we use a panel threshold regression model that allows the unemployment rate to have an asymmetric impact of the rate of...

The aim of this work is to identify whether the bidirectional relationship between entrepreneurship cycles and output gaps is asymmetric depending on the phase of the business cycle. To this end, we employ a panel threshold regression model in which different relations can prevail in each regime, defined by the values of the threshold variable. The...

The Spanish seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stood at 26.1 percent in the last quarter of 2012, almost three percentage points higher than one year earlier and almost 12 percentage points higher than at the end of 2008. Although the exponential growth of Spanish unemployment is mainly caused by a lower demand for labor, there is also a second...

Human capital obtained through education has been shown to be one of the strongest drivers of entrepreneurship performance. The entrepreneur’s human capital, though, is only one of the input factors into the production process of her venture. In this paper we will analyze to what extent the education levels of other (potential) stakeholders affect...

This work tries to shed some light on the decision of becoming self-employed with and without employees, distinguishing between paid-employment and unemployment as starting status and exploring if the exposure to foreign competition also influences this decision. In doing so, we apply binary and multinomial logit models to data drawn from the Europ...

Some three to four decades ago, it was generally accepted in economic literature that the average size of firms would continue to increase with progressive economic development. This would be the result of an ever increasing importance of exploitation of scale economies. However, since that time, small-scale selfemployment rates have increased in m...

By considering entrepreneurs who hire employees –employers– and entrepreneurs without personnel –own-account workers– as related but distinct groups within entrepreneurship, this work analyzes the roles of different factors in entrepreneurship survival from a new perspective: contrasting the determinants of own-account workers’ survival with those...

By considering entrepreneurs who hire employees –employers– and entrepreneurs without personnel –own-account workers– as related but distinct groups within entrepreneurship, this work analyzes the roles of different factors in entrepreneurship survival in Europe from a new perspective: contrasting the determinants of own-account workers’ survival w...

As several European governments develop new start-up programmes during recessions, the appropriateness of these policies recently has become a hot policy issue. This study suggests that the contribution of these incentives is dubious, if aimed to combat economic and jobs crises as part of the entrepreneurship policy, and can be shaped by various co...

This article re-examines the persistence in natural gas consumption using an alternative methodology. In particular we report estimates of an unobserved components model, in which hysteresis exists if cyclical and natural gas consumptions do not evolve independently. In addition, this framework is also extended by using the nonlinear approach, in w...

This paper estimates an unobserved components model to explore coal consumption in the USA. We ask whether coal consumption exhibits hysteresis, defined as a dynamic structure in which the cyclical component of coal consumption has permanent effects on the natural component. In contrast to previous analysis, we provide evidence in favor of hysteres...

The relationship between self-employment and certain macroeconomic variables is often at the heart of the debate about the contributions of self-employment to employment and economic growth; examining this relationship is the aim of this article. This article is devoted to the empirical exploration of the comovement and causality between entreprene...

This paper investigates the determinants of self-employment survival in Europe in two stages. The first one focuses on the effect of variables at the individual level, while the second raises questions regarding specific regional factors through the introduction of macro variables. In conducting this analysis, discrete choice models, including both...

Previous studies provide suggestive evidence that entrepreneurship varies with the state of the business cycle. This article extends the knowledge base by exploring whether the rate of self-employment – a widely used measure of entrepreneurship – is a lagging or leading indicator of the business cycle. The study, which utilizes time series UK data...

This paper examines the co-movement and causality between selfemployment and paid-employment cycles in the EU-12 countries using annual data spanning the years 1983 to 2008. Using different strategies, the causality and correlations at different horizons are used to analyze the dynamics in the paid-employment-self-employment relationship. The paper...

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to shed new light on the effects of labor market institutions and the economic conditions on self-employment composition that may help the development of a comprehensive strategy to promote job creation and sustained economic growth in the post-2009 era. Methodology/approach – Using microdata from the Europ...

This paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self-employment, while makes transitions to independent self-employment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried-work and self-employment in...

Spain is destroying more jobs than any other European country. In the third quarter of 2009, the unemployment rate stood at 17.9%, the second-highest rate in the 27-nation EU and the highest rate in the euro area (EA-16). The exponential growth of the Spanish unemployment rate is the by-product of falling employment rates. However, there is a secon...

The relationship between macroeconomic variables and stock market returns is, by now, well-documented in the literature. However, in this article we examine the long-run relationship between stock and bond markets returns over the period from 1991:11 to 2009:11, using Bai and Perron’s multiple structural change approach. Findings indicate that whil...

Este trabajo analiza el papel de la actividad innovadora de un país en la supervivencia de los emprendedores en la UE-15, considerando emprendedor al autoempleado con asalariados (o empleador). Para ello, se estiman modelos de duración sobre la base de los microdatos del Panel de Hogares de la Unión Europea (PHOGUE). Como medidas de innovación, se...

By considering entrepreneurs who hire employees – employers – and entrepreneurs without personnel – own-account workers – as related but distinct groups within entrepreneurship, this work analyzes the roles of different factors in entrepreneurship survival from a new perspective: contrasting the determinants of own-account workers’ survival with th...

An often applied labour market policy to combat unemployment is to stimulate unemployed individuals to start their own businesses. Such policy may at least, temporarily lead to increases in self-employment, in particular, in the number of own-account workers. These policies may be called successful when the formerly unemployed individuals remain in...

Determinantes de la dinámica del autoempleo y sus implicaciones sobre la efectividad de la política de promoción empresarial Resumen: Este trabajo resume los principales resultados de las investigaciones empíricas sobre la dinámica del autoempleo —en particular entrada y éxito— y discute sus posibles implicaciones sobre la efectividad de la polític...

This paper summarizes the main results of the empirical research on self-employment dynamics —particularly entry and success— and discusses their possible implications on entrepreneurial policy effectiveness. The main goal of this study is to promote a debate on this topic, encouraging conditional analyses that serve as guidance in the design of a...

We explore the macro structure of entrepreneurship rates in a panel of 23 OECD countries over 1972-2006. We find that rates of entrepreneurship in OECD’s countries exhibit persistence rather than hysteresis. Implications for the design of entrepreneurship policies are discussed.

The relationship between self-employment and some macroeconomic variables is and has been at the heart of the debate about self-employment contributions to employment and economic growth. This paper is devoted to the exploration of the co-movement and causality between entrepreneurship and economic performance in both directions. It looks for basic...

This paper investigates the determinants of self-employment entry and success in Spain during the Nine-ties by means of two complementary data sets. The data used come from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) and from the Spanish Continuous Expenditure Survey (ECPF). Toward this end, different transitions are explicitly considered by mean...

This work tries to shed some light on the decision of becoming self-employed with and without employees, distinguishing between paid-employment and unemployment as starting status. In doing so, we apply binary and multinomial logit models to data drawn from the European Community Household Panel for the EU-15 (ECHP, 1994-2001). Thus, we provide som...

The Spanish unemployment rate stood at 14,4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, the highest rate in the 27-nation EU. This exponential growth of Spanish unemployment rate is not only the by-product of falling employment but also it is the participation rate that is increasing. For this reason forecasts are underestimating the unemployment rates....

This study aims to increase our understanding of the contribution of the self-employed to the job creation process by investigating the individual decision of hiring employees. Our framework considers the individual decision of becoming self-employed with employees from own account self-employment, while other labour options such as paid employment...

Este artículo resume los principales resultados obtenidos por este grupo de investigación – Proyecto PRY115/09 perteneciente a la convocatoria de proyectos de investigación de 2009 de la Fundación Centro de Estudios Andaluces- sobre las políticas de promoción empresarial, dividiéndolos en dos tipos: los que pueden convertirse en guías útiles para m...

Are banks denying credit to firms and households in Spain? A positive answer to this question seems to be a well installed presumption between analysts and politicians who demand and motivate government intervention in several forms, including direct public finance, publicly loan guarantee schemes and even interest rates subsidization. This paper p...

This work tries to shed some light on the decision of becoming self-employed with and without employees, distinguishing between paid-employment and unemployment as starting status. In doing so, we apply binary and multinomial logit models to data drawn from the European Community Household Panel for the EU-15 (ECHP, 1994-2001). Thus, we provide som...

The relationship between unemployment and self-employment has been studied extensively. Due to its complex, multifaceted nature, various scholars have found a large array of different results, so that the exact nature of the relation is still not clear. An important element of the relation is captured by the recession-push hypothesis which states t...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

The search for a systematic set of indicators to measure the crucial dimensions of the entrepreneurship in relation to its diagnosis, forecast and tracking, has become a very first need for both the economic analysis progress, as well as to obtain an appropriate design, monitoring and evaluation of the public policies. The main contribution of this...

The aim of this paper is to survey the evidence on the relationship between self-employment and human capital from two fields in particular, economics of self-employment and empirical research on growth, emphasising in the sensibility of results to proxies used to capture education. Although, the emphasis is very much on education, rather than on a...

This paper tries to collect, describe and evaluate all the potential statistical sources—each pursuing different goals—in order to study self-employment in Spain. The improvement of traditional databases together with the recent incorporation of new statistical sources is bolstering the knowledge of today’s labour market, self-employment included....

This volume provides a comprehensive review of the theoretical concepts and empirical models of entrepreneurship from a non-conventional perspective. Its main purpose is to contribute to the design of an efficient system of indicators of entrepreneurship and competitiveness. The existence of a gap between the theory of entrepreneurship and the meth...

En este artículo se repasan los fundamentos teóricos de la relación entre el capital humano empresarial y la competitividad, conectando estas proposiciones con las nuevas directrices marcadas por la estrategia de competitividad europea, recientemente revisada.

In this paper we examine some differential facts of the Andalusian labour market in comparison with the Spanish one, concentrating on the higher incidence of youth unemployment in Andalusia. Our results show that the probability that the Andalusian young workers quickly find their first significant employment is much lower than that of the rest of...

La política empresarial de la Unión Europea se ha diseñado sobre la base de que el principal impedimento y hecho diferencial respecto a Estados Unidos en lo que respecta a la creación de empresas reside en la existencia de diferencias en la accesibilidad al capital. De esta forma, los principales instrumentos se dirigen a introducir mecanismos que...

Las matrices de contabilidad social (SAM) constituyen instrumentos de análisis y modelización de enorme interés, que recogen de manera consistente la totalidad de transacciones realizadas en una determinada economía; esta riqueza informativa que incorporan les permite mostrar una completa imagen de la realidad económica considerada y realizar una d...

The goal of this paper is to compare a reduced version of a social accounting matrix (SAM) for Andalusia and Catalunya. Using available data for Regional Accounts, Input-output tables, etc., we provide a complete picture of flow among economic agents (four producers, one consumer, the Government and one foreing agent). It is obvions this is a preli...

[eng] Transportation costs and monopoly location in presence of regional disparities. . This article aims at analysing the impact of the level of transportation costs on the location choice of a monopolist. We consider two asymmetric regions. The heterogeneity of space lies in both regional incomes and population sizes: the first region is endowed...

Entrepreneurial promotion policy has focused on facilitating the transitions to self-employment, as a way to reduce unemployment. However, little attention has been paid to the success within self-employment. By advancing in the knowledge of the determining factors of the survival within self-employment, we can complete those policies with instrume...