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Objective: The article evaluates the 2007 introduction of nontransferable and fully paid paternity leave in Spain. Background: Previous research has focused on paternity leave reforms, especially in the Nordic and continental countries. This article studies characteristics of the parental leave system design, including transferability, payment, and purpose of different types of leave for mothers and fathers in a Mediterranean country. Method: We use a quasi‐experimental approach based on a sample of heterosexual dual‐earner couples with children born before and after the paternity leave introduction. We estimate differences in differences regression models. Results: The 2007 reform caused a significant increase in fathers' number of days of parental leave. Most fathers used the whole nontransferable and fully paid paternity leave, but they hardly used transferable or unpaid leave. Mothers used all of these, especially paid leave. Conclusion: The number of nontransferable fully paid days of parental leave provided by law approximates the actual number of days most fathers used. Implications: The policy design matters. A design of equal, nontransferable, and fully paid leave for each parent is necessary for equal use by fathers and mothers—and thus for gender equality in families and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural change tests aim to identify evidence of a structural break or change in the underlying generating process of a time series. The BDS test has its origins in chaos theory and seeks to test, using the correlation integral, the hypothesis that a time series is generated by an identically and independently distributed (IID) stochastic process over time. The BDS test is already widely used as a powerful tool for testing the hypothesis of white noise in the residuals of time series models. In this paper, we illustrate how the BDS test can be implemented also in a recursive manner to evaluate the hypothesis of structural change in a time series, taking advantage of its ability to test the IID hypothesis. We apply the BDS test repeatedly, starting with a sub-sample of the original time series and incrementally increasing the number of observations until it is applied to the full sample time series. A structural change in the unknown underlying generator model is detected when a change in the trend shown by this recursively computed BDS statistic is detected. The strength of this recursive BDS test lies in the fact that it does not require making any assumptions about the underlying time series generator model. We ilustrate the power and potential of this recursive BDS test through an application to real economic data. In this sense, we apply the test to assess the structural changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in international financial markets. Using daily data from the world's top stock indices, we have detected strong and statistically significant evidence of two major structural changes during the period from June 2018 to June 2022. The first occurred in March 2020, coinciding with the onset of economic restrictions in the main Western countries as a result of the pandemic. The second occurred towards the end of August 2020, with the end of the main economic restrictions and the beginning of a new post-pandemic economic scenario. This methodology to test for structural changes in a time series is easy to implement and can detect changes in any system or process behind the time series even when this generating system is not known, and without the need to specify or estimate any a priori generating model. In this sense, the recursive BDS test could be incorporated as an initial preliminary step to any exercise of time series modeling. If a structural change is detected in a time series, rather than estimating a single predictive model for the full-sample time series, efforts should be made to estimate different predictive models, one for the time before and one for the time after the detected structural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While football is a billionaire spectacle, the figure of the referee mainly presents an amateur career and a notorious diversity among the different national and regional federations. In this article, we analyse which variables determine the lifespan of the referee's career in Madrid. We apply survival analysis toa dataset of 2,978 registered referees provided by the Real Federation de Fútbol de Madrid (RFFM). The results show relevant conclusions like the different career paths of men and women, the incidence of belonging to each of the three branch offices, the effect of being a 'talent', which are the category levels where men and women mainly drop, the relevance of starting on an earlier age and the positive effect of having been born in Madrid for men. They all constitute remarkable insights to be considered when establishing recruitment policies, training and development and support for young and active referees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Mohsen Bahmani-Oskooee, Lorenzo Escot, Miguel-Angel Galindo, Farhang Niroomand This paper examines the effects of saving and public capital on economic growth, developing a growth model and empirically investigates the role of these two variables for the European Union countries. The results show a non-homogenous situation in these countries. Using the Ordinary Least Square method, estimation results show that in the case of France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Sweeden and the United Kingdom, the saving variable has an unexpected sign and is only significant in the case of the United Kingdom. Regarding public capital results, only five countries France, Germany, Luxemburg, Netherlands and Spain, show a positive relationship.