Roberto Balado-Naves

Most evidence on the relationship between housing and fertility focuses on house prices and the cost of financing them. We take a step back and ask whether the growth of the housing stock, a tangible quantity on which policymakers can act directly, shapes fertility. A two-period quantity-quality model with a minimum housing requirement and a predetermined housing supply implies that equilibrium fertility rises with the housing stock per household. Guided by this mechanism, we estimate the effect of housing-stock growth on fertility using a panel of the 50 Spanish provinces over 2001-2022. System-GMM estimates indicate that a one-percentage-point increase in the annual growth rate of the housing stock raises the contemporaneous total fertility rate (TFR) by roughly 0.7 percent on impact. If the higher growth rate is sustained, the cumulative response reaches about 5.5 percent in the long run. The effect operates almost entirely through first-birth rates, consistent with housing availability lowering the barrier to entering parenthood, although period data cannot distinguish whether women have first births earlier or whether fewer remain childless. Both open-market and subsidized housing growth raise fertility, with effects of statistically similar magnitude per standard deviation of growth in our preferred System GMM estimates.

This paper examines the link between tourism specialization and regional growth rates and factor accumulation. Based on convergence growth theory, we use a Bartik instrument to address the endogeneity of tourism intensity in explaining GDP per capita growth rates. Using data for Spanish provinces over the 2002–2018 period, we find that tourism positively affects regional economic growth. Nonetheless, there is evidence of an inverted-U relationship, indicating that the growth-enhancing effects of tourism diminish at high levels of overnight stays per capita. We also document relevant heterogeneity depending on the degree of specialization in international vs. domestic segments and tourism seasonality. Most notably, we show that tourism increases employment rates and both private and public capital stock per capita, but negatively affects human capital. Our findings highlight that tourism can be a driver of regional development, though its benefits are uneven and may come at the expense of long-term human capital accumulation.

This paper presents a theoretical characterization of how tourism sector specialization stimulates (deters) economic growth that integrates both Tourism-Led and Beach Disease hypotheses. We develop a multisector growth model with tourism and non-tourism production from which we derive a growth equation that can be easily estimated by practitioners using conventional regression methods, building a bridge between theory and empirics. Under mild assumptions, we demonstrate theoretically that GDP per capita growth rate depends on the share the tourism sector represents over total GDP, Total Factor Productivity, and other determinants of the steady state of the economy. A testable implication is that a higher specialization in tourism services yields positive GDP per capita growth rates consistent with the Tourism-Led growth hypothesis if, and only if, the tourism sector is more productive than the rest of the economy. Otherwise, greater tourism specialization results in degrowth paths that are compatible with the Beach Disease. We also conduct simulation exercises illustrating the differential impacts of demand- and supply-side policies on long-term economic growth using calibrated parameters for Spain, a large economy in which more than 10% of GDP is generated by tourism-related activities.

In this study, we investigate whether differences in sociodemographic and housing characteristics may lead to heterogenous reactions on water demand across households in the event of an unexpected shock. In this sense, we estimate a switching regression model for residential water usage in Gijón, Spain, between 2017 and 2021, exploiting the exogenous impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and various movement restriction phases. A rich dataset that integrates real data on water consumption and pricing, alongside reported household and housing characteristics, allows us to effectively control the heterogeneity of water consumers and test changes in marginal effects over time. Our findings reveal a significant increase in average water consumption coinciding with the onset of the pandemic. This increase in water usage was particularly pronounced among households with more members and those residing in older houses that also owned outdoor amenities such as gardens or swimming pools, among other socioeconomic and housing characteristics. Additionally, our study indicates that the price elasticity of water demand did not significantly differ from zero during the periods of the State of Alarm and the New Normal. This suggests that the implementation of movement restrictions and teleworking may have amplified households’ preferences and dependence on water, thus fostering increased water consumption. Furthermore, our results point towards unchanged residential information or knowledge of the expense of water services despite the time spent at home.