Iñigo Iturbe-Ormaetxe

• University of Alicante

In this note we revisit the paper by Fonseca et al. (Series 11: 83-103, 2020) who find that education has a positive effect on health. They use several compulsory schooling reforms as instruments for education. Our objective is to replicate this causal finding, so we start by thoroughly discussing their identification strategy. In particular, we em...

Many studies find a strong positive correlation between education and adult health. A subtler question is whether this correlation can be interpreted as a causal relationship. We combine multi-country data from two cross-sections of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey and use exogenous variation in compuls...

The disposition effect (DE) is a common bias by which investors tend to sell winning assets too soon and hold losing assets too long. We complement the existing evidence in three directions. First, we check whether the DE is robust to realistic features such as transaction costs and competitive payment schemes. Second, by using a gender-balanced de...

The fact that men trade more than women in financial markets has been attributed to men's overconfidence. However, evidence supporting this view is only indirect. We directly test this conjecture experimentally, by measuring confidence using monetary incentives before participants trade in a simulated market. We find that men are more confident tha...

Gneezy and Potters (1997) designed an investment game experiment and found that, consistent with Myopic Loss Aversion (MLA), individuals are more willing to take risks when they evaluate the results of their investments less frequently. We formally prove that these findings can be accommodated by a standard CRRA functional, once we assume narrow br...

Household characteristics may have long-run effects on individual outcomes in adulthood. For instance, individuals who lived when young in households experiencing financial problems are more likely to be poor when adults. Governments try to reduce these effects and to promote equality of opportunity. The objective of this paper is to check whether...

Experimental evidence suggests that the frequency with which individuals get feedback information on their investments has an effect on their risk-taking behavior. In particular, when they are given information sufficiently often, they take less risks compared with a situation in which they are informed less frequently. We find that this result sti...

Experimental Instructions. (PDF)

Random-effect tobit regressions. (PDF)

Further Statistical Evidence. (PDF)

We study a model where individuals choose both the level of provision of a public good and the quota of low-skilled immigrants that are allowed into the country. Individuals can supplement the public good in the private market. Immigrants affect natives through three channels: (i) the labor market; (ii) tax collection; (iii) the quality of the publ...

We study how cognitive abilities correlate with behavioral choices by collecting evidence from almost 1200 subjects across eight experimental projects concerning a wide variety of tasks, including some classic risk and social preference elicitation protocols. The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been administered to all our experimental subjects...

Social security contributions in most countries are split between employers and employees. According to standard incidence analysis, social security contributions affect employment negatively, but it is irrelevant how they are divided between employers and employees. This paper considers the possibility that: (i) workers perceive a linkage between...

Fighting poverty is an important concern in most societies. This usually involves transferring resources to the poor. There exists a widespread view that European countries are much more generous to the poor than the United States. We study whether this is really the case. First, we argue that using data on aggregate spending does not allow us to c...

This paper analyzes public intervention in education, taking into account the existence of two educational levels: basic education and college education. The government decides per capita expenditure at each level and the subsidy for college education. We explore the effects of transferring resources from one level to the other on equity and effici...

This paper analyzes public intervention in education, taking into account the existence of two educational levels: basic education and college education. The government decides per capita expenditure at each level and the subsidy for college education. We explore the effect of transferring money from one level to the other on equity and efficiency....

This paper studies, both theoretically and experimentally, frame effects in the context of a public good game in which players have to make a costly contribution either i) to achieve or ii) not to lose a non excludable monetary prize. Our protocol leads to public good provision (not deterioration) only if a certain contribution level is achieved. S...

Fighting poverty is one of the main goals in the most societies. This is usually done by the transferring resources to the poor. There exists a widespread view that the European countries are more generous to the poor than the United States. We study whether this is really the case. Firts we review the evidence on aggregate spending and we do not f...

The provision of pensions for the old and public education for the young represent a large share of public budgets. In most Western countries, current Social Security systems are under a big financial stress. Several reforms have been proposed to solve this problem. This paper deals with the impact that some of these reforms have, through a politic...

The Spanish population will experience significant aging in coming years. This demographic change will impose a heavy burden on the national budget. In particular, expenditure on pensions and health are expected to rise significantly. The inflow of immigrants could help to alleviate the fiscal burden that future generations will have to bear. In th...

The financing of higher education through public spending imposes a transfer of resources from taxpayers to university students and their parents. We provide an explanation for this phenomenon. Those who attend institutions of higher education will earn more income in the future and will pay more taxes. People whose children do not receive higher e...

En los últimos años España ha dejado de ser un país exportador de mano de obra, convirtiéndose en receptor neto de trabajadores extranjeros. En este artículo describimos, en primer lugar, algunas ideas básicas de lo que dice la Teoría Económica sobre el efecto de la emigración en el país receptor. En segundo lugar, y para complementar estos resulta...

So far, the Theory of Distributive Justice has tried to single out a unique criterion of Justice. In our opinion, we live in a world in which different people hold conflicting ideas about justice. We propose a procedure for representing these individual opinions, by means of what we call ``aspiration functions'', and we present in this paper three...

So far, the Theory of Distributive Justice has tried to single out a unique criterion of Justice. In our opinion, we live in a world in which different people hold conflicting ideas about justice. We propose a procedure for representing these individual opinions, by means of what we call ``aspiration functions'', and we present in this paper three...

So far, the theory of distributive justice has tried to single out a unique criterion of justice. However, different people hold conflicting ideas about justice. We propose a procedure for representing these individual opinions by means of “aspiration functions.” We present three different ways of aggregating such opposing opinions into a socially...

So far, the theory of distributive justice has tried to single out a unique criterion of justice. However, different people hold different ideas of justice. We propose a procedure for representing these individual opinions by means of aspiration functions. We present three different ways to aggregate this different opinions into a socially acceptab...

This paper examines optimal redistribution in a model with high and low-skilled individuals with heterogeneous tastes for labor, that either work or not. With such double heterogeneity, traditional Welfarist criteria including Utilitarianism fail to take the compensation-responsibility trade-off into account. As a response, several other criteria h...

I study a model where personal income is a function of two different groups of individual characteristics, called "talent" and "effort" respectively. The distinction between these two groups is that society has taken the prior decision that the influence of traits from the first group needs to be moderated by any fair redistribution mechanism while...

We study two interesting properties of distribution problems. First, stability of solutions when the number of agents changes. Second, a consistency requirement when the number of goods changes. We use these properties to obtain a characterization of the leximin solution.

In this paper we study fair division problems with the special feature that there exists only one transferable good that everyone likes. This good will be used to compensate some individuals for their differences in other non-transferable resources (like talents or handicaps). In this context we test the traditional no-envy solution and we verify t...

In this paper we study several methods of ranking profiles ofopportunity sets by taking as a primary notion equality of opportunity,undestood as equality of choice sets. Each of these social decision ruleslooks first at the size of the common opportunity set available to allmembers of the society. If this is not decisive, additional criteria areuse...

This paper analyzes how the government should split a given budget for edu- cation between two dierenteducational levels, compulsory and post-compulsory education, in order to achieve the goals of e¢ciency and equity. We prove that, when capital markets are perfect, the government can split the budget in a way that ful…lls both goals. We also analy...

Abstract This paper analyzes,two different educational,policies. The first one consists on attaining an optimal,division of public budget,for education,between,two different educational levels, compulsory and post-compulsory or college education. The second one is the setting of the tuition fees. The objectives of the government,with these policies...

College attendance has increased dramatically across the world in the last …fty years. At the same time, the dierence between wages of colleges graduates and non-graduates has increased in many countries. One possible explanation of this change in the college premium is that the relative abilities of both groups of individuals have changed. In this...