Jose G Montalvo

Pompeu Fabra University | UPF · Department of Economy and Business

The foreclosure crisis associated with the banking crisis transformed banks in the hardest-hit countries into real estate brokers. The main novelty of this paper is to study banks as sellers of their own foreclosed properties and compare banks’ sales outcomes with those of traditional agents in the real estate market. We compare the list price, sel...

Official statistics on economic inequality are only available at low frequency and with considerable delay. This makes it challenging to assess the impact on inequality of fast-unfolding crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, and to rapidly evaluate and tailor policy responses. We propose a new methodology to track income inequality at high frequency u...

Este artículo analiza la evolución de la desigualdad de ingresos en España durante la crisis de la COVID-19 en alta frecuencia. Para ello, utilizamos datos anonimizados de registros bancarios de más de 3 millones de titulares de cuentas bancarias entre febrero de 2020 y julio de 2021. Los resultados muestran el fuerte aumento de la desigualdad expe...

Pandemics have historically had a significant impact on economic inequality. However, official inequality statistics are only available at low frequency and with considerable delay, which challenges policymakers in their objective to mitigate inequality and fine-tune public policies. We show that using data from bank records it is possible to measu...

We use data from a a large Spanish personal finance management fintech to have a first look at the heterogeneous effects of the COVID-19 on spending. We show a large reduction on spending since mid-March, coinciding with the shutdown of the economy and the strict confinement of population. Since the end of April the is a recovery of spending althou...

In this paper, we document the long-run impact of the geographical heterogeneity in skills among the first settlers to Latin America. To this end, we compile administrative data on the early settlers in the Americas between 1492 and 1540 including, among others, name, city of origin, destination, and occupation. From a methodological perspective, a...

The Spanish financial system has lived through a tumultuous period. The delay of the Spanish authorities in recognizing the problems, and the mistakes of the original plan to address the issues, has derived in a long and traumatic process of recapitalization. The new regulation, targeted at eliminating the perverse incentives in the housing finance...

We model the behaviour of a mortgagor considering to evade the real estate transfer tax. We build an observable measure of over-appraisal that is inversely related to tax evasion and conclude that the tax authority could focus auditing efforts on low-appraisal transactions. Our empirical analysis confirms the predictions using a unique database for...

The relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and economic growth is complex. Empirical research working with cross-country data finds a negative, or statistically insignificant, relationship. However, analysis at city level finds a positive effect of diversity on wages and productivity. Generally, there is a trade-off between the economic benefits...

This chapter surveys the literature on the economics of religion, with a particular emphasis on its association with conflict. There is a long tradition of work on the relationship between conflict and ethnic diversity culminating with Horowitz’s seminal Ethnic Groups in Conflict. The effect of religion on conflict has generated less attention. Rec...

The literature on the effect of shocks on civil conflicts has grown rapidly over the last decade. In this paper, we study the relationship between earthquakes and terrorism. In the short run, the destruction generated by a medium-range earthquake reduces the opportunity cost of rebelling against the government. Since destruction of infrastructures...

We propose a new methodology for predicting electoral results that combines a fundamental model and national polls within an evidence synthesis framework. Although novel, the methodology builds upon basic statistical structures, largely modern analysis of variance type models, and it is carried out in open-source software. The methodology is motiva...

We propose a new methodology for predicting election results that combines respondent-level survey data and national polls within a Bayesian synthesis framework. This methodology is largely motivated by the specific chal- lenges of forecasting elections with the participation of new political parties. This situation is especially relevant in post-2...

The introduction of limits or regulatory penalties on high LTV ratios for residential mortgages is one of the most frequently used tools of macroprudential policy. The available evidence seems to indicate that this instrument can reduce the feedback loop between credit and house prices. In this paper, we show that these constraints on LTV ratios, u...

We review microeconomic research on corruption from the last thirty years. We start by analyzing the seminal models of corruption built on three-tier, delegation models. Then, go into more details of the context of corrupt deals, and discuss the main economic factors that a¤ect corruption. We discuss incentives and compensation in bureaucracies, an...

Are cultural differences good or bad for economic development? Can cultural differences generate conflicts and, therefore, retard economic development? Or can cultural diversity spur creativity and improve economic welfare? These are the type of questions that this chapter addresses. There are many channels through which a diverse society may affec...

Abstract: The generalization of " big data " and new techniques brought by the management and analysis of large datasets is changing drastically science and business management. Applications as the recommendation tools in Amazon, have provided consumers with a significant improvement in their shopping experience. In this paper I analyze the potenti...

We analyze the determinants of real estate and credit bubbles using a unique borrower-lender matched dataset on mortgage loans in Spain. The dataset contain real estate credit and price conditions (loan principal and spread, and the appraisal and market price) at the mortgage level, matched with borrower characteristics (such as income, labor statu...

This paper re-examines the electoral effect of the 11-M terrorist attacks in Madrid. Previous research has focused on post-electoral surveys to construct counterfactuals for the evaluation of the electoral impact of the attack. Bali (Electoral Studies, 2007) claims that the terrorists attacks had an important electoral impact while Lago and Montero...

This paper studies the determinants of school choice, focusing on the role of information. We consider how parents' search efforts and their capacity to process information (i.e., to correctly assess schools) affect the quality of the schools they choose for their children. Using a novel dataset, we are able to identify parents' awareness of school...

One would suspect that higher levels of inequality within a country tend to be associated with an increased likelihood of conflict. However, this article argues that there does not appear to be a clear correlation between measures of inequality and conflict. More promising appears to be a relationship between conflict and measures of polarization....

Can terrorist attacks be timed to change the outcome of democratic elections? In this paper, we analyze the electoral impact of the terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004, in Madrid. Studies using individual level postelectoral survey data reach contradictory conclusions. We propose an alternative approach. Since the bombings took place only three day...

This article uses data on more than 1,000 political leaders between 1875 and 2004 to investigate whether having a more educated leader affects the rate of economic growth. We use an expanded set of random leadership transitions because of natural death or terminal illness to show, following an earlier paper by Jones and Olken (2005), that leaders m...

This paper introduces a mixture model based on the beta distribution, without pre-established means and variances, to analyze a large set of Beauty-Contest data obtained from diverse groups of experiments (Bosch-Domènech et al. 2002). This model gives a better fit of the experimental data, and more precision to the hypothesis that a large proportio...

OBJECTIVE: To understand the factors influencing health workers' choice to work in rural areas as a basis for designing policies to redress geographic imbalances in health worker distribution. METHODS: A cohort survey of 412 nursing and medical students in Rwanda provided unique contingent valuation data. Using these data, we performed a regression...

To understand the factors influencing health workers' choice to work in rural areas as a basis for designing policies to redress geographic imbalances in health worker distribution. A cohort survey of 412 nursing and medical students in Rwanda provided unique contingent valuation data. Using these data, we performed a regression analysis to examine...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the growth of housing prices at the municipal level during the recent housing Spanish boom. In particular, we consider explicitly the effect of land use regulation on housing prices. We also consider the effect of immigration and employment growth at the municipality level. The results show that neither land...

China’s rapid economic growth has been the proximate cause of the huge reduction in the incidence of poverty since 1980. Yet, the growth process has been highly uneven across sectors and regions. We test whether the pattern of China’s growth mattered to poverty reduction using a new provincial panel data set constructed for this purpose. Our econom...

The existing research on foreign aid offers inconclusive evidence on the factors that make aid effective. In this paper, we study the supply of aid money in 112 developing countries over the period 1960-1999 and find that the presence of multiple donors in a given country renders aid less effective. In particular, an aid-receiving country at the me...

José Montalvo of Universitat Pompeu Fabra argues that investors, not issuers, should pay for ratings.

The 2008-09 recession was very intense and the first truly global economic crisis. A fundamental, and partly differential feature, of the recent crisis is the fundamental role played by the overvaluation real estate assets in the process of weakening the banking system, and the international transmission of financial and credit problems. This artic...

Inequality and polarisation are two different measures of heterogeneity. As in the case of inequality, the measurement of polarisation was initially developed in the context of a continuous dimension (income). However, in many important dimensions, like ethnicity, there are no available measures of distance across ethnic groups and individuals are...

Foreign aid provides a windfall of resources to recipient countries and may result in the same rent seeking behavior as documented in the “curse of natural resources” literature. In this paper we discuss this effect and document its magnitude. Using panel data for 108 recipient countries in the period 1960–1999, we find that foreign aid has a negat...

Geographical imbalances in the health workforce have been a consistent feature of nearly all health systems, and especially in developing countries. In this paper we investigate the willingness to work in a rural area among final year nursing and medical students in Ethiopia. Analysing data obtained from contingent valuation questions for final yea...

The authors analyze the relationship between ethnic polarization and the duration of civil wars. Several recent papers have argued that the uncertainty about the relative power of the contenders in a war will tend to increase its duration. In these models, uncertainty is directly related to the relative size of the contenders. The authors argue tha...

The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million clinical cases of malaria occur annually and observed that during the 80s and part of the 90s its incidence increased. In this paper, we explore the influence of refugees from civil wars on the incidence of malaria in the refugee-receiving countries. Using civil wars as an instrumental variab...

Recent research point out that higher education has no significant effect upon economic growth. However, the data of many countries show a substantial increase in the salary prize of going to university. Most of the explanations argue that the increase in salary relative to universities is due to the acceleration of technology change, which increas...

Geographical imbalances in the health workforce have been a consistent feature of nearly all health systems, and especially in developing countries. In this paper we investigate the willingness to work in a rural area among final year nursing and medical students in Ethiopia. Analyzing data obtained from contingent valuation questions, we find that...

Economists have recently turned their attention to the effects of terrorism. One much debated effect of terrorist attacks is its impact on the results of democratic elections. We use the electoral consequences of the terrorist attacks of the 11-M in Madrid to analyze this issue. We consider this particular experiment since the attack took place onl...

The basic objective of the article is to provide some evidence on the dynamic adjustment of the Philippines’ regional labor markets to shocks. The response of labor markets to a negative labor demand shock is very similar to the findings reported by [Blanchard, O., & Katz, L. (1992), Regional evolutions. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1, 1–...

In this article we are concerned about access policies and non-discriminatory treatment for airport users, which are the core part of the regulatory and competitive environment of the non-competitive segment of air transportation. The objective is to analyze the situation in a set of countries of Latin America and propose a group of feasible regula...

Recently, Sachs et al. (2004) have argued in favor of a massive increase in foreign aid to Africa in order to escape from a poverty trap. They propose to increase the capital stock in one step, through a large, well-targeted infusion of foreign assistance. In this article we show that foreign aid has a negative impact on the democratic stance of de...

This paper analyzes the role that different indices and dimensions of ethnicity play in the process of economic development. Firstly, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of alternative data sources for the construction of indices of religious and ethnic heterogeneity. Secondly, we compare the index of fractionalization and the index of pola...

This paper analyzes the relationship between ethnic fractionalization, polarization, and conflict. In recent years many authors have found empirical evidence that ethnic fractionalization has a negative effect on growth. One mechanism that can explain this nexus is the effect of ethnic heterogeneity on rent-seeking activities and the increase in p...

Evidence shows that real-effort investments can affect bilateral bargaining outcomes. This paper investigates whether similar investments can inhibit equilibrium convergence of experimental markets. In one treatment, sellers’ relative effort affects the allocation of production costs, but a random productivity shock ensures that the allocation is n...

Recent development cooperation with Guinea-Bissau, focusing on good governance, statebuilding and conflict prevention, did not contribute to democratization nor to the stabilization of volatile political, military and economic structures. The portrayal of Guinea- Bissau as a failed “narco-state”, as well as Western aid meant to stabilize this state...

Aquest estudi presenta una anàlisi econòmica ex ante de la futura construcció d¿una font de llum de sincrotró al Vallès Occidental. El projecte consisteix en la construcció d¿una font de llum que aconseguirà un feix d¿electrons amb energies en el rang d¿almenys 2,5 GeV. A la vista dels objectius i d¿un escenari bàsic, l¿anàlisi financera en l¿escen...

The concept of scapegoating is frequently used to explain how opportunistic elites attempt to deflect blame onto vulnerable ethnic minorities, particularly during times of social turmoil. However, the notion of scapegoating is undertheorized in the confli

I modify the uniform-price auction rules in allowing the seller to ration bidders. This allows me to provide a strategic foundation for underpricing when the seller has an interest in ownership dispersion. Moreover, many of the so-called "collusive-seeming" equilibria disappear.

This paper develops a finite mixture distribution analysis of Beauty-Contest data obtained from diverse groups of experiments. ML estimation using the EM approach provides estimates for the means and variances of the component distributions, which are common to all the groups, and estimates of the mixing proportions, which are specific to each grou...

Esteban and Ray (Econometrica 1994) describe a measure of polarization that is closely connected to potential conflict or tension in a society, emphasizing the difference between polarization and inequality. In principle a very highly polarized society may have a low level of inequality measured, for instance, using the Gini index. The original app...

This paper analyzes the effect of religious diversity on economic development. We argue that the religious polarization index is more appropriate to measure the effect of potential conflict on economic development than the traditional fragmentation index. The empirical exercises support this view.

An analysis is given of the effect of market makers on liquidity using a transaction-level database. For this purpose, the focus is on a financial market where a change in regulations created explicitly the category of market maker in 1997 and that date is used to construct a pseudo-experiment. In contrast with other studies that use ultrahigh freq...

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This paper reviews the results of the CHEERS project on the transition of young Spaniards from the education system to the labor market.

The World Health Organization estimates that 300 million clinical cases of malaria occur annually and its incidence increased during the 90's. There are basically two factors behind the incidence of malaria: "geographical destiny", or ecological conditions, and social conditions, which are related with unstable populations or movements of people. I...

La flexibilité est souvent vue comme condition nécessaire à la survie des marchés de travail nationaux et à celle des organisations dans un monde en rapide changement où s’accroît la compétition globale. Elle a adopté diverses formes tels les contrats à durée déterminée, l’externalisation, les horaires flexibles, le temps partiel, les heures complé...

This paper ia an attempt to clarify the relationship between fractionalization, polarization and conflict. The literature on the measurement of ethnic diversity has taken as given that the proper measure for heterogeneity can be calculated by using the fractionalization index. This index is widely used in industrial economics and, for empirical pur...

This note shows that the assumptions about the abatement technology modify the impact of the environmental taxation on the long-run growth driven by human capital accumulation � la Lucas (1988), when lifetime is finite. Whereas no impact of the environmental policy on long-run growth is found when pollution originates from final output and abatemen...

El precio de la vivienda es un indicador económico importante por múltiples motivos. El acceso a una vivienda digna y adecuada es un precepto constitucional y la accesibilidad depende, entre otras cosas, de su precio. Además la vivienda es un activo más, en general el más importante, en la cartera de las familias y, por tanto, las modificaciones en...

This paper analyzes the role of religious conflict in the process of development of a country. We construct an index of religious polarization using data on the proportions of each religion in a country. The index of polarization is an alternative to the usual fragmentation index. We argue that for the case of religious conflict the fragmentation i...

"Beauty-contest" is a game in which participants have to choose, typically, a number in [0,100], the winner being the person whose number is closest to a proportion of the average of all chosen numbers. We describe and analyze Beauty-contest experiments run in newspapers in UK, Spain, and Germany and find stable patterns of behavior across them, de...

The mixture distribution model is one of the benchmarks for modelling the relationship between volume and return. A basic variable in that theoretical construction is the number of intraday equilibria, which is empirically unobservable. This paper re-examines the finding in Lamoureux and Lastrapes (Journal of Finance, 45, 1990) using alternative pr...

This article summarizes a few stylized facts on the microstructure of financial markets and, in particular, futures markets. With the reference of those stylized facts we have analyzed the data generated by the Spanish futures on the 10-years government bonds. This papers shows that the traded volume intraday and interdays in the Spanish futures ma...

In this article I present a brief survey of the main methodologies proposed by the Federal Aviation Administration of the US Department of Transportation and the European Region of Airport Council International. Subsequently, I advance a methodology which includes direct, indirect and induced effects for the estimation of the economic impact of an...

This paper analyzes the dynamic behavior of price changes in the Spanish futures market and its determinants using data on transactions observed during several days. The econometrictechnique is the ordered probit, which allows the accommodation of the main characteristics of the data: price changes are quoted in increments of a minimum and transact...

This paper proposes a new credibility indicator for the EMS based on the realignment expectations calculated using the inferred probabilities derived from the estimation of a Markov-switching regimes model. This indicator avoids most of the problems presented by the so-called ‘drift adjusted method’ and, in particular, it accounts, in a natural man...

The "traditional" approach to the estimation of count-panel-data models with fixed effects is the conditional maximum likelihood estimator. The pseudo maximum likelihood principle can be used in these models to obtain orthogonality conditions that generate a robust estimator. This estimator is inconsistent, however, when the instruments are not str...

This paper compares the finite sample performance of the canonical correlation regression estimator (CCR) and Stock and Watson's (A simple estimator of cointegration vectors in higher order integrated systems, Econometrica, 1993, 61(4), 783–820) dynamic ordinary least squares estimator (DOLS) using the models proposed by Inder (Journal of Econometr...

This paper examines investment in foreign technology by Japanese firms, using previously unexplored data on technology transfer to Japan. The relationship between the acquisition of foreign technology and firm size, liquidity and affiliation with a corporate group, or keiretsu, is analyzed. Our results indicate that the number of licensing agreemen...

This paper presents an analysis of the credibility of the EMS currencies that covers the period before and after the increase in the bands of fluctuation. Our credibility indicator is based on the inferred probabilities derived from the estimation of a Markov-switching model (Hamilton (1989)) applied to the expected rate of depreciation. The result...

El documento analiza la posibilidad de efectos umbral en el crecimiento asociados con la intensidad de capital público. Se estima un modelo de crecimiento de Solow aumentado con capital humano usando datos de los estados estadounidenses para el período 1969-86, rechazándose la existencia de un régimen único para todos los estados, cuando el capital...

The dispute over the extent of global poverty hinges mostly on the disparity between household surveys and the national accounts estimates. In this paper we use data from the provinces of China to document the extent of this disparity in a major contributor to global poverty. JEL Classification number: O1, C80.

This paper analyzes the role that different dimensions of ethnicity plays in the process of growth of a country. We cover essentially four issues. First, and in contrast with the ethnic characteristics considered in other studies, this paper emphasizes the importance of religious conflict in the explanation of economic growth. Second we consider an...

Our objetive in this paper is to consider the in‡uence of the incidence of malaria in the decision of population to migrate conditional on the intensity of a civil con‡ict. It is well known that violence and civil wars are basic explanations in force migration. However, the intensity of the con‡ict is just one of the determinants of the ‡ow of migr...

This article discusses the regulatory framework and organization of airports in several Latin America countries in order to identify obstacles preventing free and non-discriminatory access to airport. In particular, the article exposes the basic elements of air transportation liberalization and discusses airport organization options and some basic...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the growth of housing prices at the municipal level. In particular, we consider explicitly the effect of land use regulation on housing prices. As far as we know this is the first research of this type in the Spanish case. We also consider the effect of immigration and employment growth at the municipality le...

The evaluation of the impact of public infrastructures is a very important exercise, given that the size of the budget for public works is quite large in all the levels of government. In this paper we present a new methodology to measure the impact of the transformation of national roads into highways with an application to the Spanish case. During...