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El pdf del artículo es el documento de trabajo. ; Although it is commonly accepted that most macroeconomic variables are non-stationary, it is often difficult to identify the source of the non-stationarity. Integrated processes and short-memory models with trending components, possibly affected by structural breaks, imply similar features in the data and, accordingly, are hard to distinguish. The goal of this article is to extend the classical testing framework of I(1) versus I(0) + trends and/or breaks by considering a more general class of models under the null hypothesis: fractionally integrated (FI) processes. The asymptotic properties of the proposed tests are derived and it is shown that they are very well-behaved in finite samples. An illustration using US inflation data is also provided. ; Financial support from the Spanish Government CICYT project no SEJ2006-00369, the BGSE Research Network and the Generalitat de Catalunya is gratefully acknowledged.

This paper contributes to the literature on majority voting over fiscal policies. We depart from the standard model in two dimensions. First, besides redistributing income, the government uses the net tax revenue to finance the provision of goods and services that become in-kind transfers to the citizens. By deciding on the composition of this expenditure (education, health, law-and-order, etc.), the government chooses the allocation of the benefits to the different income segments. This choice is a fundamental ingredient of fiscal policy. Second, we tackle the problem of choosing the income tax function and the composition of public expenditure by assuming that the political process selects one of these issues as the salient one. Political controversy and vote focus on this issue exclusively. The other dimension is determined in a way so as to minimize objections (obtain consensus) among the voters. We analyze the case where the salient policy is the composition of public expenditure. We show that for each voted expenditure policy, there is a unique income tax function that attains consensus. The political process we model yields that the progressiveness of the income tax schedule depends on income inequality interacted with the elasticity of substitution of the goods provided in the market and those publicly provided. This relationship is confirmed in our empirical test. ; Peer reviewed

Trabajo presentado en el Workshop on Conflict organizado por el Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research (IGIER) en Milán, los días 4 y 5 de mayo de 2017 ; This paper studies costly conflict over private and public goods. Oil is an example of the former, political power an example of the latter. Groups involved in conflict are likely to be small when the prize is private, and large when the prize is public. We examine these implications empirically by constructing a global dataset at the ethnic group level and studying conflict along ethnic lines. Our theoretical predictions find significant confirmation in an empirical setting. ; Ray thanks the National Science Foundation for research support under grant number SES-1261560 ; Peer reviewed

Publicado como: Barcelona GSE Working Paper, nº 743, November 2013 Presentada conferencia en: Facultat d'Economia i Empresa, Universitat Rovira Virgili, Reus (Tarragona), el 4 de marzo de 2014 ; We model the political process as consisting of voting on the issue considered salient, public expenditure, with a subsequent consensus over size of government and income taxation. We prove that for each majoritarian choice there is a unique consensus policy on progressivity and government size. We empirically validate the implication that the sign of the relationship between inequality and progressivity chosen by the median voter is conditional on the degree of substitutability between government and market supplied goods. We also obtain that this substitutability has a negative impact on the negative marginal effect of inequality on the size of government ; Esteban and Mayoral research has been funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya and the CICYT (ECO2011-25293) ; Peer Reviewed

In this paper we examine the link between ethnic and religious polariza- tion and conflict using interpersonal distances for ethnic and religious attitudes obtained from the World Values Survey. We use the Duclos et al (2004) polar- ization index. We measure conflict by means on an index of social unrest, as well as by the standard conflict onset or incidence based on a threshold number of deaths. Our results show that taking distances into account significantly improves the quality of the fit. Our measure of polarization outperforms the measure used by Montalvo and Reynal-Querol (2005) and the fractionalization index. We also obtain that both ethnic and religious polarization are significant in explaining conflict. The results improve when we use an indicator of social unrest as the dependent variable. ; Financial support from the Axa Research Fund, the Government of Catalonia, and the CICYT project n. SEJ2006-00369. Financial support from the CICYT project n. SEJ2006-00369. ; Peer reviewed

Presentado como comunicación en el Department of Political Science, Columbia University in the City of New York, en noviembre de 2012 Presentado como comunicación en "Concentration on Conflict", Civil Conflict and Rationality. Barcelona GSE Summer Forum, celebrado del 10 al 12 de junio de 2013 en Barcelona (España) ; Most empirical studies on civil conflict are not able to find a significant relationship between interpersonal-measures of economic inequality and the likelihood of conflict. When individuals belong to groups, general inequality (measured by the Gini) can be decomposed into three components: between-group inequality (BGI), within-group inequality (WGI), and 'Overlap' (which is inversely related to the economic segregation of groups). This paper shows that is possible to establish a robust empirical relation between group-based measures of income differences and con- flict. Drawing on over 200 individual-level surveys from 89 countries, we create a new data set that allows us to measure these three components and to examine their empirical relationship with civil conflict. Consistent with Esteban and Ray's (2011) argument about the need for labor and capital to fight civil wars, we find a strong, robust positive association between WGI and civil conflict. And consistent with the "contact hypothesis" in sociology, we find that the economic segregation of groups (as measured by a lower Overlap component) is often associated with more civil conflict. Since some components of inequality are associated with more civil conflict but others are associated with less, the analysis helps explain why it has been difficult to identify a relationship between general inequality and civil war. And the strong finding for WGI underscores the value of developing clear theories about how the internal characteristics of groups influence the incidence of civil conflict ; Peer Reviewed

15 páginas, 2 figuras, 3 tablas.-- El pdf es la versión pre-print del artículo.-- Trabajo presentado a la conferencia "Microeconomic Sources of Real Exchange Rates" (Vanderbilt University-USA, 2010). ; A novel approach to analyzing real exchange rate (RER) persistence and its sources is presented. Using highly disaggregated data for a group of EU-15 countries, it is shown that the distribution of sectoral persistence is highly heterogeneous and skewed to the right, so that a limited number of sectors are responsible for the high levels of persistence observed at the aggregate level. Quantile regression has been employed to investigate whether traditional theories, such as the lack of arbitrage due to nontradability or imperfect competition combined with price stickiness, are able to account for the slow reversion to parity of RERs. ; Financial support from the Spanish Government CICYT projects SEJ2006-00369 and ECO2008-03040 ; Peer reviewed

In this paper we study the effect of religiosity on the political choices over redistribution and over the legal restrictions on personal liberties. Religious teachings generally restrict individual behavior on issues such as consumption of some goods, sexual orientation, divorce, abortion, gay marriage, contraception and so on. We assume that the more religious an individual is, (i) the less he enjoys the use of liberties prohibited by his religion; and (ii) the higher the negative externality experienced when others in society practice those liberties beyond what he deems adequate. The first assumption implies that, when the law allows for the use of liberties, secular individuals have a higher incentive to work than religious ones. As a result, the political choice of legal restrictions on liberties has an impact on income inequality. The second implies that religious individuals may prefer to repress liberties in society. As repression of liberties reduces income inequality, poor religious individuals may still prefer low taxes compared with richer and less religious ones. We also analyze the choice of redistribution and the legal cap on liberties as the majoritarian outcome in a citizen-candidate model. We obtain that when the majority of the population is religious and the religious cleavage in society is large, high intolerance due to negative externalities leads to a political outcome consisting of repression of liberties and relatively low income taxes. ; Joan Esteban and Laura Mayoral gratefully acknowledge financial support ´ from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Grant, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in RD (SEV-2015-0563) and grant number ECO2015 − 66883−P, Generalitat de Catalunya project number 2017SGR1359, and the National Science Foundation grant SES-1629370 ; Peer reviewed

Presentado el 22 de mayo de 2014 en la Conference on Axioms, Results and Methods in Normative Economics, celebrada del 22 al 24 de mayo de 2014 en Granada (España). Presentado el 9 de junio de 2014 en el International Economic Association 17th World Congress, celebrado del 6 al 10 de juni de 2014 en el Dead Sea (Jordania). Presentado como conferencia en el Department of Economics, Università di Bologna. Presentado como conferencia en el Departamento de Fundamentos de Análisis Económico de la Universidad de Alicante el 31 de octubre de 2014. Presentado como conferencia el 2 de diciembre de 2015 en el Economics & Political Science (EPS) Seminars de INSEAD, The Business School for the World. ; In this paper we study the role of religiosity in political choices such as redistribution and individual liberties. To a standard model with consumption and effort, we add a third good: civil liberties with a cap established by law. More liberties, like divorce, abortion, gender parity, or gay marriage, may be considered good by the secular and detrimental by the religious individuals. With standard assumptions on individual preferences, one obtains that wider liberties increase the marginal utility of consumption to seculars, and decrease it to religious individuals. Labor supply and income are therefore lower for religious individuals in the presence of liberties. This implies a higher share of religious agents among the poor consistent with evidence that the poor care more about "moral values". We analyze the preferences of individuals over taxation and the legal cap over liberties. We show that restriction of liberties can arise as an equilibrium outcome of a simple political process when society is sufficiently religious. Moreover, if economic polarisation is lower than religious polarisation, restriction of liberties results in lower taxation. Thus more religious societies will impose lower taxation both because (i) their productivity is lower, (ii) repression of liberties is more likely to arise and result in lower taxes ; Joan Esteban and Laura Mayoral gratefully acknowledge financial support from the AXA Research Fund, the Generalitat de Catalunya, and the CICYT (ECO2011-25293) ; Peer Reviewed

We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on conflict, by using a specification based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links conflict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenberg index. The empirical analysis verifies that these distributional measures are significant correlates of conflict. These effects persist as we introduce country-specific measures of group cohesion and of the importance of public goods, and combine them with the distributional measures exactly as described by the theory. (JEL D63, D74, J15, O15, O17)

Trabajo presentado a: "HICN Workshop on civil wars and political violence" celebrado en Barcelona en 2011; Association for Public Economic Theory (APET) celebrado en 2011 en Tailandia. ; We examine empirically the impact of ethnic divisions on con!ict, by using a speci>cation based on Esteban and Ray (2011). That theory links con!ict intensity to three indices of ethnic distribution: polarization, fractionalization, and the Gini-Greenberg index. The empirical analysis veri>es that these distributional measures are signi>cant correlates of con!ict. These effects persist as we introduce countryspeci >c measures of group cohesion and of the importance of public goods, and combine them with the distributional measures exactly as described by the theory. ; /nancial support from CICYT project ECO2011-25293 and Recercaixa. Esteban and Mayoral are bene/ciaries of a /nancial contribution from the AXA Research Fund. Ray's research was funded by National Science Foundation Grant SES-0962124 and a Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation. ; Peer Reviewed

This paper investigates the time series properties of partisanship for five political parties in Spain. It is found that pure fractional processes with a degree of integration, d, between 0.6 and 0.8 fit the time-series behaviour of aggregate opinion polls for mainstream parties quite well, whereas values of d in the range of 0.3 to 0.6 are obtained for opinion polls related to smaller regional parties. Those results are in agreement with theories of political allegiance based on aggregation of heterogeneous voters with different degrees of commitment and pragmatism. Further, those models are found to be useful in forecasting the results of the last general elections in Spain. As a further contribution, new econometric techniques for estimation and testing of ARFIMA model are used to provide the previous evidence. ; Publicado