Drug price differentials caused by de-listing and price cap policies

This paper analyses the behaviour of pharmaceutical companies that face the threat of having their drugs excluded from reimbursement and the markets characterised also by price caps. We conclude that price elasticity of demand and cost differentials cause the price discounts which drug firms offer to health care organisations. Additionally, we conclude that price cap regulations affect the time path of prices, resulting in higher prices for new products and lower prices for old products.

Copyright issues related to the implementation of Open Access policies

The presentation provides an overview of the copyright issues related to the implementation of Open Access policies. It focuses on the need to obtain permission to reproduce and disseminate a copy of any published paper taking into account any copyright transfer signed by authors. This permission is needed to implement Green Open Access policies through repositories. Moreover it explores the use of open content licenses in repositories and journals to move to the Gold Open Access model that offers not only free access to full text but full reuse of contributions.

An overlapping generations approach to price policies in privatehealthcare insurance. The Catalan case

We analyze premium policies and price dispersion among private healthcare insurance firms from an overlapping-generations model. The model shows that firms that apply equal premium to all policyholders and firms that set premiums according to the risk of insured can coexist in the short run, whereas coexistence is unlikely in the long run because it requires the coincidence of economic growth and interest rates. We find support for the model’s results in the Catalan health insurance industry. Keywords: Economic theory, price policies, health insurance, health economics, overlapping-generations. JEL Classifications: I11 / L11 / L23

Construcción de un índice de calidad ocupacional (ICO) para el análisis de la inserción profesional de los graduados universitarios = Building an employment quality index (EQI) to analyse graduates’ access to the labour market

En este trabajo se propone la construcción de un índice de calidad ocupacional (ICO) a partir de los datos de la Encuesta de Inserción Laboral de los Graduados de las Universidades Catalanas realizada por la Agencia para la Calidad del Sistema Universitario de Catalunya (AQU), que ha de permitir un mejor análisis de la información que proporciona la encuesta y facilitar su comparación con estudios similares. La encuesta se realiza tres años después de la graduación. En este artículo, se utiliza la segunda encuesta realizada el año 2005 entre 11.456 graduados (52,63%) de la promoción 2001 (AQU, 2005, Serra-Ramoneda, 2007). El índice se ha elaborado a partir de los indicadores objetivos ‘tipo y duración del contrato laboral’, ‘retribución económica’, ‘adecuación entre la formación universitaria y el empleo’ a los que se otorga una puntuación ponderada según las respuestas dadas por los graduados. La suma de las puntuaciones se matiza con un coeficiente derivado del indicador subjetivo ‘satisfacción con el trabajo en general’. A partir de la información proporcionada por el índice, se realiza un análisis comparativo del nivel de calidad ocupacional que han logrado los graduados de áreas de conocimiento, ámbitos de trabajo, ramas de actividad y ubicaciones territoriales del empleo diferentes. Los resultados obtenidos permiten observar que entre los graduados catalanes los siguientes hechos son buenos predictores de la calidad de la ocupación: haber estudiado una carrera que no sea de Humanidades, ser un hombre, haber desempeñado durante la carrera un trabajo relacionado con los estudios, estar ocupado en la construcción, en instituciones financieras o en servicios a empresas, haber tenido algún tipo de movilidad por motivos de trabajo, trabajar fuera de Cataluña y hacerlo en empresas grandes, especialmente con más de 500 trabajadores. Finalmente, se presentan algunas reflexiones y propuestas que pueden resultar de interés para la orientación de los estudiantes y la planificación universitaria

Gender inequalities in occupational health related to the unequal distribution of working and employment conditions: a systematic review

Gender inequalities exist in work life, but little is known about their presence in relation to factors examined in occupation health settings. The aim of this study was to identify and summarize the working and employment conditions described as determinants of gender inequalities in occupational health in studies related to occupational health published between 1999 and 2010. A systematic literature review was undertaken of studies available in MEDLINE, EMBASE, Sociological Abstracts, LILACS, EconLit and CINAHL between 1999 and 2010. Epidemiologic studies were selected by applying a set of inclusion criteria to the title, abstract, and complete text. The quality of the studies was also assessed. Selected studies were qualitatively analysed, resulting in a compilation of all differences between women and men in the prevalence of exposure to working and employment conditions and work-related health problems as outcomes. Most of the 30 studies included were conducted in Europe (n=19) and had a cross-sectional design (n=24). The most common topic analysed was related to the exposure to work-related psychosocial hazards (n=8). Employed women had more job insecurity, lower control, worse contractual working conditions and poorer self-perceived physical and mental health than men did. Conversely, employed men had a higher degree of physically demanding work, lower support, higher levels of effort-reward imbalance, higher job status, were more exposed to noise and worked longer hours than women did. This systematic review has identified a set of working and employment conditions as determinants of gender inequalities in occupational health from the occupational health literature. These results may be useful to policy makers seeking to reduce gender inequalities in occupational health, and to researchers wishing to analyse these determinants in greater depth.

Immigration and housing: rethinking the role of fiscal policies to manage diversity

We study the two key social issues of immigration and housing in lightof each other and analyse which housing policies work best to distributediversity (racial, economic, cultural) equally across our cities and towns. Inparticular, we compare the impact of direct government expenditure andtax incentives on the housing conditions of immigrants in four Europeancountries: France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. The analysisshows that the different policies which have been adopted in these countrieshave not succeeded in preventing immigrants from being concentratedin certain neighbourhoods. The reason is that housing benefits andtax incentives are normally “spatially blind”. In our opinion, governmentsshould consider immigration indirectly in their housing policies and, forinstance, distribute social housing more evenly across different areas topromote sustainable levels of diversity.

Understanding the gains from wage flexibility: The exchange rate connection

We study the gains from increased wage flexibility and their dependence on exchange rate policy, using a small open economy model with staggered price andwage setting. Two results stand out: (i) the impact of wage adjustments on employment is smaller the more the central bank seeks to stabilize the exchange rate,and (ii) an increase in wage flexibility often reduces welfare, and more likely so ineconomies under an exchange rate peg or an exchange rate-focused monetary policy.Our findings call into question the common view that wage flexibility is particularlydesirable in a currency union.

Sectoral and occupational employment growth in Spain 1995-2005

Between 1995 and 2005, the Spanish economy grew at an annual average rate higher than 3,5%. Total employment increased by more than 4.9 millions. Most of this growth was in occupations related with university degrees (more than 890,000, 18% of the total employment increase) and vocational qualifications (more than 855,000, 17.5% of the total employment increase). From a sectoral perspective, the main part of this increase took place in “Real estate, renting and business activities” (K sector in NACE rev.1), “Construction” (F sector) and “Health and social sector” (N sector). This paper analyses this employment growth in an Input-output framework, by means of a structural decomposition analysis (SDA). Two kinds of results have been obtained. From a sectoral perspective we decompose employment growth into Labour requirements change, technical change and demand change. From an occupational perspective, we decompose the employment growth in substitutions effect, labour productivity effect and demand effect. The results show that, in aggregated terms, the main part of this growth is attributable to demand growth, with a small technical improvement. But the results also show that this aggregated behaviour hides important sectoral and occupational variation. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing debate over productivity growth and what has been called the “growth model” for the Spanish economy.

Handbook for the design of intercultural policies: summary of the original Spanish version

Local governments need minimum common criteria to manage the social dynamics of diversity. This Handbook defends the strategy of interculturality as a public political approach, based on a way to interpret interculturality as a positive resource, as a public cultural and a collective good. It is an approach that promotes the equitative interaction as a way to generate a cohesive common public space. This Handbook provides the reader with the conceptual and practical instruments to help (and inspire) those territories which would like to integrate interculturality as an urban project.It aims to serve as a ground for discussion to jointly work in local administrations and other government levels, fororganizations and institutions, as well as for cultural, political and citizens collectives. Results are presented asan action by the Red de Ciudades Interculturales (RECI), within the Intercultural Cities framework by the Councilof Europe, with the collaboration of Obra Social "La Caixa".

Job accessibility, employment and job-education mismatch in the metropolitan area of Barcelona

This paper analyses the effect of job accessibility by public and private transport on labour market outcomes in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. Beyond employment, we consider the effect of job accessibility on job-education mismatch, which represents a relevant aspect of job quality. We adopt a recursive system of equations that models car availability, employment and mismatch. Public transport accessibility appears as an exogenous variable in the three equations. Even though it may reflect endogenous residential sorting, falsification proofs suggest that the estimated effect of public transport accessibility is not entirely driven by the endogenous nature of residential decisions.

The effects of regional educational policies on school failure in Spain

This paper presents a regional analysis of the effects of educational policies implemented in Spain between 1992 and 2003, focusing specifically on school failure rates. We consider the impact of expenditure per pupil, class size, and pupil-teacher ratio on dropout rates at the end of compulsory education and on the proportion of early school-leavers in the 18-24 year age group. Our results indicate that higher levels of educational expenditure per pupil and lower class sizes and pupil-teacher ratios reduce rates of dropout and early school-leaving (although class-size is not always significant). However, the magnitude of the effects of these variables is small at the average level.

De què vas, tio?

My study is based on an ethnography of two groups of young people from working-class neighbourhoods in Barcelona. I was interested in researching the impact of Catalan language policies on the identities of young people of Spanish-speaking immigrant families. I sought to go beyond the constraints of traditional structuralist approaches in Sociolinguistics in order to make my analysis relevant to people working for gender equality, the promotion of the Catalan language, or other social causes. I combine ideas from Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Fairclough, Foucault and Goffman to build a dialectical, historical, process-centred perspective that conceptualises practices in terms of social and political struggles.I analyse young people's peer-group activities in terms of their significance for the construction of gender identities. I propose a variety of forms of masculinity and femininity according to the various ways in which members organised their gender displays in face-to-face interaction.I also show how their use of argot and dialectal Spanish was part of the processes whereby members defined their relationships, constructed particular subject positions in interaction and struggled to legitimate their own values.I explore the meanings constructed through Catalan and Spanish by looking into the code-switching practices of my participants. I analysed their talk in terms of narratives that present particular sequential dramatisations of events for conversational audiences. These narratives follow the expressive intention of the author, and are populated with multiple voices of animated characters. I argue that, in the groups I studied, Catalan was generally not used to animate the voices that were central to the identities of the peer-group, and particularly to masculine identities.In order to contextualise these practices within the wider society, I also look into the processes of language choice in face-to-face encounters. I argue that existing conventions made it difficult for people to find opportunities to speak Catalan. I also pointed to the difficulties that my participants had to find employment, which were particularly acute amongst the more politically aware individuals. I conclude that these young working-class people had little possibilities of investing in more egalitarian forms of identity given their lack of resources and opportunities to develop their identities in other social spaces, such as the workplace.