Pedro Albarran

• University of Alicante

We report the evidence of a multi-stage lab experiment on individual decision making under ambiguity, where the latter is characterized by the (partial or) absence of information on some monetary values in the support of the lottery distributions. This complements the standard treatment of uncertainty where decision makers know the monetary prizes,...

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...

This paper tests whether barely obtaining a pass score in at least one of two midterm tests has an effect on subsequent achievement in a Math course. To estimate the effect, we created a novel dataset by linking administrative and survey data on students at a medium size Spanish university and used a regression discontinuity design in which the cut...

This work proposes a multimodal approach with which to predict the regional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by combining historical GDP values with the embodied information in Twitter messages concerning the current economic condition. This proposal is of great interest, since it delivers forecasts at higher frequencies than both the official statisti...

This paper implements the estimation of dynamic probit correlated random effects (CRE) models with unbalanced panel data. The type of models we consider include a lag of the endogenous variable and other explanatory variables that are strictly exogenous. We introduce a Stata package, xtprobitunbal; this command estimates these models allowing for t...

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...

This work presents a method to predict the regional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) using the textual information stored in tweets. In particular, we propose the use of a hybrid autoencoder to predict the GDP of the Valencian Community (Spain) using the tweets written by the most influential economists, politicians, newspapers, and institutions in the...

This paper presents estimation methods for dynamic nonlinear models with correlated random effects (CRE) when having unbalanced panels. Unbalancedness is often encountered in applied work and ignoring it in dynamic nonlinear models produces inconsistent estimates even if the unbalancedness process is completely at random. We show that selecting a b...

This paper focuses on the evaluation of research institutions in terms of size-independent indicators. There are well-known procedures in this context, such as what we call additive rules, which provide an evaluation of the impact of any research unit in a scientific field based upon a partition of the field citations into ordered categories, along...

This article compares the average productivity of migrants (who work in a country different from their country of origin) and stayers (whose entire academic career takes place in their country of origin) in a set of 2,530 highly productive economists that work in 2007 in a selection of the top 81 Economics departments worldwide. The main findings a...

In this paper, we study the spatial characteristics of a sample of 2605 highly productive economists, and a subsample of 332 economists with outstanding productivity. Individual productivity is measured in terms of a quality index that weights the number of publications up to 2007 in four journal classes. We analyze the following four issues. (1) T...

Using a large data set, indexed by Thomson Reuters, consisting of 4.4 million articles published in 1998–2003 with a 5-year citation window for each year, this article studies country citation distributions for a partitioning of the world into 36 countries and two geographical areas in eight broad scientific fields and the all-sciences case. The tw...

Albarrán et al (2009a) introduced a novel methodology for the evaluation of citation distributions using a pair of high- and low-impact measures defined over the set of articles with citations below or above a critical citation level. Albarrán et al (2009b) presented the first empirical applications to a situation in which the world citation distri...

This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific about the citation process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998-2002 in 219 Web of Science categories, or sub-fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different characteristics across sub-fields. However, when analyzed with the Characteristic Scores and Scales techniq...

Investment in transport infrastructure reduces the cost of distance and enables firms to establish contacts over larger distances. Using data from a panel of Spanish manufacturing firms and geographic information system techniques, this article studies the impact of domestic transport cost reductions on firms’ export market participation, taking in...

This paper introduces a novel methodology for comparing the citation distributions of research units of a certain size working in the same homogeneous field. Given a critical citation level (CCL), we suggest using two real valued indicators to describe the shape of any distribution: a high-impact and a low-impact measure defined over the set of art...

This article studies massive evidence about references made and citations received after a 5-year citation win-dow by 3.7 million articles published in 1998 to 2002 in 22 scientific fields. We find that the distributions of ref-erences made and citations received share a number of basic features across sciences. Reference distributions are rather s...

This paper studies evidence from Thomson Scientific about the citation process of 3.7 million articles published in the period 1998-2002 in 219 Web of Science categories, or sub-fields. Reference and citation distributions have very different characteristics across sub-fields. However, when analyzed with the Characteristic Scores and Scales techniq...

In this paper, scientific performance is identified with the impact that journal articles have through the citations they receive. In 15 disciplines, as well as in all sciences as a whole, the EU share of total publications is greater than that of the U.S. However, as soon as the citations received by these publications are taken into account the p...

This paper contains the first empirical applications of a novel methodology for comparing the citation distributions of research units working in the same homogeneous field. The paper considers a situation in which the world citation distribution in 22 scientific fields is partitioned into three geographical areas: the U.S., the European Union (EU)...

In this paper we highlight the importance of analysing the evolution of income inequality separately for employees and self-employed workers. Using Spanish panel data on income and consumption for the period 1987–96, we find noticeable differences across these groups in the evolution of income inequality, and in the relative importance of the trans...

In this paper we highlight the importance of analysing the evolution of income inequality separately for employees and self-employed workers. Using Spanish panel data on income and consumption for the period 1987-96, we find noticeable differences across these groups in the evolution of income inequality, and in the relative importance of the trans...

This paper presents two new graphical devices to describe the lower and the upper tail of a citation distribution, as well as a novel methodology to compare the research performance of two sets of scientists. The key to these contributions is the identification of a citation distribution in any scientific field with an income distribution. Then the...

Transport infrastructure investment reduces the cost of distance and enables firms to establish and maintain contacts over larger distances. Spain has developed an ambitious road building programme over the last decades, which has considerably reduced transport costs to access European markets. In this paper we depart from the traditional aggregate...

This paper presents some preliminary evidence about the existence of power laws representing the upper tail of the citation distributions among 221 scientific sub-fields or Web of Science categories distinguished by Thomson Scientific within the natural and the social sciences. The main finding is that, in a sample consisting of 767,828 articles pu...

We consider the general problem of estimation and testing from a sequence of overlapping moment conditions generated by incomplete or rotating panel data. The crucial idea of our suggested method is to separate the problem of moment choice from that of estimation of optimal instruments. We propose a cross-sample GMM estimator that forms direct esti...

Oxford University Press, 2013.This chapter examines the interaction between public programmes and private transfers. It analyses the PROGRESA - a large welfare programme in rural Mexico aimed at fostering the accumulation of human capital by increasing school enrolment, improving nutrition, and health practices. The programme crowded out private tr...

This paper studies some empirical implications of models with limited risk sharing due to the imperfect enforceability of contracts. We test whether the amount by which public transfers reduce private transfers is affected by features of the economy, such as the variance of income and its persistence. These implications are unique to models with im...

This paper studies some empirical implications of models with limited risk sharing due to the imperfect enforceability of contracts. We test whether the amount by which public transfers reduce private transfers is affected by features of the economy, such as the variance of income and its persistence. These implications are unique to models with im...

This book presents research on the relationship between risk and poverty in developing countries. It explores risks and shocks affecting the poor, the risk-coping mechanisms they use, the measurement of vulnerability to poverty, and policy implications. The book is divided into seven parts. Part I discusses risk-sharing strategies. Parts II and III...

This paper analyses precautionary saving associated with income risk. I model income dynamics decomposing the innovation into its idiosyncratic, cohort-specific and aggregate components, as in Banks, Blundell and Brugiavini (1999). However, compared to their repeated cross-sections, I show how my rotating panel (the Spanish family expenditure surve...

In this paper we look at two aspects of the risk (measured as earnings volatility) faced by employees and self-employed individuals. First we analyse the differences in the amount and the nature (permanent or transitory) of the risk faced by the employees and the self-employed. Second, we analyse the willingness to bear risk and the ability to insu...

Transport infrastructure investment reduces the cost of distance and enables firms to establish contacts over larger distances. We study the impact of transport-cost reductions on firms' export behaviour, accounting for the role of entry costs and other firms' characteristics. Using Spanish data we estimate dynamic probability models controlling fo...

Albarrán et al. (2009a) introduced a novel methodology for the evaluation of citation distributions consisting of a pair of high- and a low-impact measures defined over the set of articles with citations below or above a critical citation level CCL. Albarrán et al. (2009b) presented the first empirical applications to a situation in which the world...