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[eng] Circular migrations have played an important role in multiple migratory episodes in the past and present. They have also increasingly been a source of interest for political institutions. Based on the Triple Win theory, governments and other public and private institutions perceive these migrations as a way to alleviate labour shortages, brain drain and fight against illegal migration. However, the differential impact of these migrations in source and host societies is a factor sometimes neglected by the literature, despite being potentially important for our understanding of a variety of key social and economic indicators. This thesis analyses circular migrations in Spain during the rural exodus, 1955-1973. To do so it focuses on a key scenario of internal migration during this period, intimately related to this typology of migratory flows: the formation of the tourism labour market in Spain, with particular attention to the main tourist region, the Balearic Islands. The Spanish tourism boom is characterised by an intense process of structural change with crucial socio-economic ramifications in the short and long term, shaping the economic specialisation of the Spanish economy and some of the characteristics of its labour market. The process of labour market formation in this sector was based on intense migrant assimilation shaped by circular migratory flows, which in the mid-XX was a notable and distinctive component of international and internal population mobility in comparison with other European countries. Thus, the study of this historical episode addresses the relationship between the persistence of circular internal migrations in Spain and the development of the tourism industry, labour market inequality, migrants’ location choices and their levels of social mobility during the period. The study of circular migrations and tourism employment both in the past and present involves significant methodological obstacles, given the scarcity of sources and methods appropriate for the distinctive features of this phenomenon. To overcome them, one contribution of this thesis is an array of novel micro and macro quantitative and qualitative sources from archival work in combination with methodological and conceptual innovations akin to recent studies such as that of Dustmann and Görlach (2016). The present study integrates both empirical quantitative and qualitative approaches to respond to two sets of guiding questions. Firstly, the process of labour market formation is studied to explore the role and impact of circular migration on the model of industrial relations and levels of labour market inequality in the host regions. Secondly, from this analysis, three main questions arise that are answered in the following chapters: Did circular migration play a significant role in fostering firm expansion? Why did some households from southern Spain decide to migrate to tourist regions and persist in migrating circularly over several years? Did the temporariness of the migration significantly explain the differential levels of social mobility? A key result of this work is that the development of tourism in this period implied the formation of a new labour market, where both intra and interregional circular migration became crucial for the level of growth recorded. The short-term impact of this migration was in accordance with most of the assumptions of the Triple Win Model: circular migrants helped the expansion of firms which benefited the social mobility of locals and long-term migrants in the hospitality and tourism-related economy, and circular migrants found in the tourism regions abundant seasonal jobs with lower comparative human capital requirements than other destinations and better wages than in their place of origin. However, this pattern of tourism development also meant a higher level of labour inequality and significant constraints for future economic and socio-ecological adaptation. The temporariness was an important factor to understand these results. The author’s interpretation concludes that most circular migratory movements were the result of voluntary and non-voluntary returns. While voluntary returns were shaped by the differential capacity of capital accumulation and investment in the areas of origin and destination, most persisted in circular migration because of housing shortages, lack of migratory networks, seasonal labour demand and an inadequate labour regulatory framework. In this context, the empirical results suggest that circular migrants had lower incentives and capacity to acquire host-specific human and social capital, key drivers of occupational upgrading. As the years of circular migration increased the income differential between these migrants and natives and similar but permanent migrants grew higher. As a result, the tourism development under this model of development and institutional framework produced social and economic inequality in the host societies and difficulties in achieving social cohesion in the mid-term. These results highlight the crucial role of public policies that pay attention to the differential nature of circular migrations, particularly regarding housing and employment policies.

The study explores the expectations and cooperative behaviours of men and women in a lab-in-the-field experiment by means of citizen science practices in the public space. It specifically examines the influence of gender-based pairings on the decisions to cooperate or defect in a framed and discrete Prisoner’s Dilemma game after visual contact. Overall, we found that when gender is considered behavioural differences emerge in expectations of cooperation, cooperative behaviours, and their decision time depending on whom the partner is. Men pairs are the ones with the lowest expectations and cooperation rates. After visual contact women infer men’s behaviour with the highest accuracy. Also, women take significantly more time to defect than to cooperate, compared to men. Finally, when the interacting partners have the opposite gender they expect significantly more cooperation and they achieve the best collective outcome. Together, the findings suggest that non verbal signals may influence men and women differently, offering novel interpretations to the context-dependence of gender differences in social decision tasks.

[eng] In countries in the developed world, income inequality is increasing, while technological and societal changes open labour market opportunities for women. At the same time they are undergoing an important demographical transition with decreasing fertility and increasing population ageing. All these trends affect the decisions that different generations make over the life-cycle. In this thesis, I investigate the role that these trends play for education, fertility, and pensions. In the second chapter of this thesis, I investigate how income inequality is affecting education attainment. An important difference between countries with low and high levels of social mobility is the extent of upward mobility of children from low income families. This is mainly explained by the probability of high school dropout. I develop a model with three levels of education in which children facing a credit constraint choose which level of education to attain. I find in an empirical exercise that in the U. S. the opportunity cost of education is more important in explaining the high school dropout rate of men than the return on education. The model and the empirical results imply that a policy that reduces the opportunity cost of education and is paid by higher taxation on graduates, reducing the return on education, could decrease dropout rates. In the third chapter, I analyse the decline in fertility in Germany. Decomposing the decline in completed fertility in Germany of the cohorts of women born between 1930 and 1965, I observe two distinct stages: In the first stage the decline in fertility is due to a decrease in intensive fertility (number of children per women with at least one child), whereas in the second stage the decline is due to a decrease in extensive fertility (increase in childlessness). Based on an event study approach, I argue that there are high opportunity cost of having children for women in terms of working time independent of their education level. Based on these findings, I develop an overlapping generations model with childlessness and quantity/quality trade-off driven by the time cost of children. In a calibration exercise, this model is able to generate the decline in intensive fertility as well as the increase in childlessness that I observe in the data with an decrease in the gender wage gap. The forth chapter of my thesis is a joint work with Gianko Michailidis on the effect of population ageing and income inequality on public education and pensions. We developed an overlapping generations model with public and private education, a pay-as-you-go pension system, endogenous fertility, and probabilistic voting on pensions and education spending. In this model, an increase in income inequality increases public education and pensions spending per enrolled student and retiree, respectively, and decreases the participation in public education and fertility. An increase in the share of retirees in the economy decreases the per student spending on public education and pensions, while decreasing the participation in public education and the fertility rate. Empirical evidences from OECD countries confirm our theoretical predictions regarding education spending.

Esta tesis es una compilación de cuatro publicaciones en las que se abarca con una perspectiva a largo plazo los mecanismos familiares de reproducción social y las tendencias generales de desigualdad socioeconómica en el área de Barcelona entre los siglos XV y XX. Los mecanismos familiares de reproducción social se entienden como los elementos económicos, institucionales, legales, políticos y/o culturales que las familias utilizan para mantener, mejorar y/o transmitir el status social heredado y/o adquirido. Estos se canalizan a través de la influencia familiar de dos medios principales, la transmisión o movilidad social intergeneracional (de ascendientes a descendientes) y la movilidad social intrageneracional (de un individuo a lo largo de su ciclo vital). En este sentido, la reproducción social está interrelacionada con los niveles de desigualdad socioeconómica existentes en diferentes contextos históricos. Se han utilizado datos de la Barcelona Historical Marriage Database (1481-1880) así como la Sant Feliu de Llobregat Longituinal Demographic Database (1828-1940), todo ello en el seno de dos proyectos de investigación, el ‘Five Centuries of Marriages’ y ‘Tecnología e innovación ciudadana en la construcción de redes sociales históricas para la comprensión del legado demográfico’ (XARXES) respectivamente. Entre los hallazgos más importantes de esta tesis se puede concluir que la transmisión intergeneracional preindustrial era alta, sobre todo en el grupo de los campesinos y de los artesanos y principalmente para los primeros hijos como cabría esperar para una sociedad de Antiguo Régimen donde el sistema hereditario se basaba en el heredero único. Sin embargo, pese a que el sistema hereditario por definición se basaba en la desigualdad entre hermanos/as, no se ha observado desclasamiento de los hermanos y hermanas no herederos. De hecho, se aprecia como las hermanas serán las que se casarán más fuera de su grupo social de origen, un hecho refuerza la importancia de la unidad familiar de “casa” en las sociedades agrícolas catalanas como la historiografía apunta. No obstante, durante la industrialización. se encuentran evidencias empíricas del declive del sistema de heredero único, ya que la progresión social de hermanos no herederos enseñó mejor trayectoria laboral que hermanos herederos, debido a las nuevas oportunidades en una estructura ocupacional cambiante. En este sentido, se demuestra como la influencia familiar en el destino social de sus descendientes disminuyó, aunque no desapareció, contrariamente a lo que apuntan teorías como la de la modernización, ayudando a entender la evolución histórica del sistema familiarista de las sociedades actuales de países del sur de Europa. Por lo que atañe a la desigualdad económica, una estimación continua a largo plazo para cuatro siglos en un área extensa y de importancia económica y política como ha sido el área de Barcelona ha podido constatar que la disparidad económica fue más alta en épocas preindustriales debido a la sociedad estamental de antiguo régimen, al contrario de lo que se había defendido tradicionalmente. Sin embargo, a través de la reconstrucción de la estructura ocupacional se encuentran evidencias de que el importante crecimiento de la desigualdad económica en la industrialización se debe mayoritariamente por un importante efecto de proletarización. Finalmente, la ulterior conclusión referente a la interrelación entre el papel de la familia y la desigualdad económica en esta tesis ha enseñado que pese a la importante presencia de la familia, las barreras entre clases sociales no se han roto en casi cinco siglos, un elemento que se conecta con la actual preocupación en relación a las disminución de la movilidad en nuestras sociedades. This thesis includes a compilation of four publications with a long-term perspective on the mechanisms of social reproduction and the general trends of socioeconomic inequality in the Barcelona area between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The familial mechanisms of social reproduction encompass economic, institutional, legal, political, and/or cultural mechanisms for maintaining, improving, and / or transmitting the acquired or inherited social positions or tangible and intangible assets. Such mechanisms are channeled through family influence by two main means, the intergenerational transmission or social mobility (from ancestors to descendants) and the intragenerational social mobility (of an individual throughout his / her life cycle). In this sense, social reproduction is interrelated with the levels of socioeconomic inequality existing in different historical contexts. The data used in this thesis was provided by the Barcelona Historical Database of Marriage (1481-1880) and the Sant Feliu de Llobregat Longituinal Demographic Database (1828-1940), both developed within the projects el ‘Five Centuries of Marriages’ y ‘Tecnología e innovación ciudadana en la construcción de redes sociales históricas para la comprensión del legado demográfico’ (XARXES) respectively. Among the most important findings in this thesis it can be concluded that the peindustrial intergenerational transmission of social status was indeed high, especially among peasants and artisans and mainly for the first children as would be expected in an Old Regime society based on an inheritance with the principle of impartibility. However, despite the fact that the hereditary system by definition was based on the inequality between siblings, there was not downward social mobility of non-heir brothers and sisters. In fact, non-heir females used to marry out the social group as a strategy, a fact that reinforces the importance of the family unit of the “casa” (house) in the Catalan agricultural societies as historiography pointed out. Nevertheless, during the industrialisation era, there are evidences pointing out that the single-heir inheritance system declined, due to a major social progression of non-heir siblings than heirs within the new occupational opportunities emerged. Accordingly, the influence of family in the social fate of descendants decreased over time but did not vanish, in contrast to what was argued by classical theories as the Modernization one, which also can be interpreted by the importance of the family strong ties in Southern European countries. Regarding the economic inequality, the long term estimation conducted across four centuries in an extensive geographic zone as the Barcelona area showed that inequality was indeed higher on preindustrial societies than in the industrial period. The reason for this would seem to be the preindustrial ordered social structure contributing to a more unequal society than the industrial one based on skilled and unskilled occupations. However, industrialisation brought about a new situation, where likely processes of proletarianization induced a new kind of inequality. Finally, the last conclusion refers to the interrelation between the role played by families and the economic inequality, which has been seen in this thesis that although the family importance in social reproduction, the social barriers between social classes were never broken throughout five centuries, an element that may be linked to the present concern about the decrease in social mobility in our societies.

The Economics of Parking is an emerging research area attracting growing attention of transportation economists as well as engineers, planners, practitioners and policy makers. Analyzing parking behavior and the effects of its supply, demand and regulation has become essential for our understanding of major aspects of mobility, such as modal choice, congestion costs, car ownership decisions, and destination choice. ...

In recent decades, many countries around the world have become more fiscally decentralised. Spain provides a unique case study given it has relatively quickly transitioned from a highly centralised country to a much more decentralised country, although formally not a federation. As part of this decentralisation, autonomy over individual income tax rates and brackets was recently granted to the regions (Autonomous Communities), which are similar to states or provinces in other countries. In the early 2000s, individual income tax brackets and rates were the purview of the central government. Only recently were the Spanish regions granted the authority to levy their own individual income tax rates on a portion of the personal income tax base. Once granted this authority, marginal tax rates diverged substantially at the top of the income distribution, resulting in substantial tax differentials across various regions within Spain. This article reviews the economic consequences of Spanish fiscal decentralisation with a particular focus on the impact on the mobility of high-income individuals and the implications of migration decisions for public finances.

Understanding human mobility is of vital importance for urban planning, epidemiology, and many other fields that draw policies from the activities of humans in space. Despite the recent availability of large-scale data sets of GPS traces or mobile phone records capturing human mobility, typically only a subsample of the population of interest is represented, giving a possibly incomplete picture of the entire system under study. Methods to reliably extract mobility information from such reduced data and to assess their sampling biases are lacking. To that end, we analyzed a data set of millions of taxi movements in New York City. We first show that, once they are appropriately transformed, mobility patterns are highly stable over long time scales. Based on this observation, we develop a supersampling methodology to reliably extrapolate mobility records from a reduced sample based on an entropy maximization procedure, and we propose a number of network-based metrics to assess the accuracy of the predicted vehicle flows. Our approach provides a well founded way to exploit temporal patterns to save effort in recording mobility data, and opens the possibility to scale up data from limited records when information on the full system is required., EU-LASAGNE Project (Contract 318132 (STREP)), Spain. Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (Grant FIS2012-38266-C02-02), Generalitat de Catalunya (FI Program 2014-SGR-00608), Enel Foundation, Audi Volkswagen, SENSEable City Lab Consortium

This paper is aimed at presenting a new intergenerational mobility index that (a) combines the intergenerational elasticity and the R-squared of the intergenerational regression and (b) enables the expression of the total degree of mobility as the weighted sum of mobility with respect to both parents. As a case study, we apply our proposal to investigate the intergenerational mobility of education in several European countries and its changes across birth cohorts. The results derived from the proposed index indicate that Nordic countries display higher levels of educational mobility than Southern countries, whereas continental countries are in an intermediate position. Moreover, it appears that the degree of mobility increases over time only in those countries with low initial levels and remains stable for the most mobile countries. Finally, for most of the countries the proposed methodology can prove that the degree of educational mobility with respect to each parent tends to converge to the same level over the course of time.

[eng] There is a vast literature on intergenerational mobility in sociology and economics. Similar interest has emerged for the phenomenon of over-education in both disciplines. There are no studies, however, linking these two research lines. We study the relationship between social mobility and over-education in a context of educational expansion. Our framework allows for the evaluation of several policies, including those affecting social segregation, early intervention programs and the power of unions. Results show the evolution of social mobility, over-education, income inequality and equality of opportunity under each scenario., [cat] Hi ha una àmplia literatura sobre la mobilitat intergeneracional a les àrees de sociologia i economia. El fenomen de la sobreeducació ha suscitat interès similar en ambdues disciplines. No hi ha estudis, però, que uneixin aquestes dues línies d.investigació. En aquest article s'estudia la relació entre la mobilitat social i la sobre-educació en un context d'expansió de l'educació. El nostre marc permet l'avaluació de diverses polítiques, com les que afecten la segregació social, els programes d'intervenció primerenca i el poder dels sindicats. Els resultats mostren l'evolució de la mobilitat social, la sobre-educació, la desigualtat i la igualtat d'oportunitats en cada escenari.

L’article identifica les modalitats de transició dels joves vers l’emancipació familiar a partir de recerques anteriors i aplica aquest enfocament teòric a una enquesta a joves d’una zona de capitalisme avançat, amb la finalitat d’obtenir una distribució de trajectòries escolars, laborals i d’emancipació. S’hi descriuen quatre modalitats bàsiques de transició, s’hi realitza un exercici empíric de classificació de joves de 26 a 29 anys en aquestes modalitats i s’hi verifica la hipòtesi clau segons la qual s’afirma la recessió de les modalitats d’èxit precoç i de les trajectòries obreres, en favor de les modalitats d’aproximació successiva i de precaritat. L’anàlisi permet relacionar els canvis en l’estructura del capitalisme i els canvis en els models de transició dels joves a l’emancipació i la posició social. Particularment, s’hi insisteix en la forma de tempteig dels joves i el que això significa a nivell d’estil de vida. «En les formes d’encarar la transició i la incertesa del futur (el tempteig), intuïm canvis substancials en les modalitats de transició que augmenten la diferència d’experiències i percepcions entre pares i fills i percebem que les institucions tenen un camp d’acció ampli destinat a modificar trajectòries que anuncien futurs negatius»., This article identifies the forms of transition of young people towards emancipation from the family based on earlier research, applying this theoretical approach to a survey of young people in an advanced capitalist region, with the aim of obtaining a picture of their educational, employment and emancipation profiles. Four basic forms of transition are described; young people between the ages of 26 and 29 are empirically classified in these four categories, and an examination is made of the key hypothesis that states that the categories of early success and working class itineraries are being displaced by the successive approach and paths of precariousness. An analysis allows a relationship to be drawn between changes in the structure of capitalism and changes in the forms of transition of young people towards emancipation and social status. Particular emphasis is laid on the form of testing used by young people, and what this means at a lifestyle level. «In the ways in which transition and the uncertainties of the future are faced (testing), we have seen substantial changes in forms of transition which increase the difference in experience and perception between parents and children, and we have observed that institutions have a broad area in which they can act to modify careers that would seem to present a negative future».