Papers by Victoria Osuna Padilla
SIGLEAvailable from Bibliothek des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft, ZBW, Duesternbrook Weg 120, D-2... more SIGLEAvailable from Bibliothek des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft, ZBW, Duesternbrook Weg 120, D-24105 Kiel C 191424 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman
This paper evaluates the effects for the Spanish case of allowing greater flexibility regarding t... more This paper evaluates the effects for the Spanish case of allowing greater flexibility regarding the weekly hours worked on the working week, employment and productivity. A baseline model economy is calibrated to reproduce the cross-sectional distribution of workweeks across plants, as well as certain features of the Spanish economy. The author compares the steadystate status quo, where a forty-hour workweek is imposed and no flexibility is allowed, and the steady-state of economies with a higher degree of flexibility in weekly hours. The 2012 reform is found to preserve employment and generate a 1.72% increase in productivity. In the work-sharing scenario, the increase in employment (1.86%) comes at the expense of a lower increase in productivity (1.31%). Finally, the full flexibility scenario preserves employment and generates a substantial increase in productivity (2.6%).
Review of Economic Dynamics, 2003
In this paper we study the implications of taxing overtime work in order to reduce the workweek. ... more In this paper we study the implications of taxing overtime work in order to reduce the workweek. To this purpose we study the roles played by team work, commuting costs and idiosyncratic output risk in determining the choice of the workweek. In order to obtain reliable estimates of the consequences of our policy experiment, we calibrate our model economy to the substitutability between overtime and employment using business cycle information. We find that a tax-rate of 12% of overtime wages implements the desired reduction of the workweek from 40 to 35 hours (12.5%). We also find that this tax change increases employment by 7% and reduces output and productivity by 10.2% and 4.2%, respectively. We also study a model economy with cross-sectional variations in the workweek that arise from plant-specific output risk and we find that in this model economy the taxrates needed to achieve the same workweek reduction are significantly larger. Finally, we find that taxing overtime dampens the business cycle fluctuations and that its welfare costs seem to be very large.
Labour Economics, 2014
This paper evaluates Spain's recent labour market reform concerning the reduction in severance pa... more This paper evaluates Spain's recent labour market reform concerning the reduction in severance pay from 45 to 33 days of wages per year of seniority and the introduction of a new subsidized permanent contract. We also compare this policy with the introduction of a single open-ended labour contract with increasing severance payments for all new hirings. We use an equilibrium search and matching model to generate the main properties of this segmented labour market. Our steady-state results show this reform will reduce unemployment (by 20%) and job destruction (by 29%). However, in terms of wage subsidies, the cost of implementing this reform will be very high. A cheaper and more effective way to decrease the duality in the labour market would be to eliminate temporary contracts and introduce a single contract. Unemployment and job destruction in this case would be reduced by 28% and 42%, respectively. Most interestingly, tenure distribution would be even smoother than under the designed reform: 21% more workers would end up having tenures of more than three years, and there would be 32% fewer one-year contracts. The transition shows that both changes would benefit a majority of workers: only 8.1% would be jeopardized under the approved reform (5.8% in the transition to the single contract) due to improvement in job stability.
La inmigración y su efecto en las finanzas públicas andaluzas" *
Revista de economía …, 2006
El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar el impacto que la entrada de inmi-grantes tendrá sobre la... more El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar el impacto que la entrada de inmi-grantes tendrá sobre las cuentas de las Administraciones Públicas andalu-zas y sobre la sostenibilidad a largo plazo de las actuales políticas de gasto público en Andalucía. Para ello, realizamos diferentes ...
Topics in Macroeconomics, 2005
In the mid 80's, many European countries liberalized the use of fixed-term (temporary) contra... more In the mid 80's, many European countries liberalized the use of fixed-term (temporary) contracts in order to lower firm's non-wage labor costs, instead of reducing firing costs associated with indefinite duration (permanent) contracts. This policy generated segmented labor markets. The Spanish case is the most striking, with a share of temporary employment of 33% by the mid 90's. Since then, several reforms have been suggested and in this paper I quantify some of their effects. First, I build a model of job creation and destruction of the search and matching type that is able to generate the main properties of a segmented labor market like the Spanish one. Then, I use his model to quantify the effects of removing procedural wages, and further reductions in firing costs associated with permanent contracts. The main results are: (i) a small increase in permanent job destruction, (ii) a significant reduction in temporary job destruction, mainly driven by the increase in job...
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Papers by Victoria Osuna Padilla