The stylised facts describing the poor performance of the youth labour market in Spain over the last two decades, entailing high unemployment rates for both higher and lower educated workers, over-education and low intensity of on-the-job training, are explained through a simple matching model where higher educated workers crowd-out lower educated ones from their traditional entry jobs. In this model, a combination of rigid labour market institutions and an increase in the relative supply of higher educated workers harms the training prospects of lower educated workers.2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.JEL classixcation: J21; J23.

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This paper provides the first evidence on the dynamics of immigrant students' achievement following their migration to Spain. Using the data from 2003, 2006 and 2009 wave of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), we show that immigrant students tend to perform significantly worse than native students, but that their performance improves with time spent in Spain. Among immigrants, Latin Americans enjoy an initial linguistic advantage, which, however, does not help them to catch up faster. The rate of improvement is such that students who stay almost all their lives in Spain still perform worse than natives in all domains analyzed by PISA. To better understand this achievement gap, we decompose it into parts attributable to school quality and to family characteristics. We observe that most of the gap is explained by individual and family characteristics and that less than 15 % We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions received from Victor Aguirregabiria (editor), the anonymous reviewer, Manuel Bagues, Michele Boldrin, Antonio Cabrales, Jose Ignacio García, Sergi Jiménez, and participants at the European Economic Association (EEA) Congress, the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) conference, the Spanish Economic Association (SAE) Congress, and the FEDEA workshop on the economic effects of immigration. We also acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, Project ECO2008-06395-C05-05. of it can be attributed to differential school attendance. Overall, the evidence suggests that policies that do not target the learning environment in disadvantaged families are likely to have a limited impact on the native-immigrant achievement gap.

This paper analyzes the gender distribution of research fields in economics based on a new dataset of almost 1,900 researchers affiliated to top-50 economics departments in 2005, as ranked by Econphd.net website. We document that women are unevenly distributed across fields and test some behavioral implications from theories underlying such disparities. Our main findings are that the probability that a woman works on a given field is positively related to the share of women already working on that field (path-dependence), and that this phenomenon is better explained by women avoiding male-dominated fields than by men avoiding female dominated fields. This pattern, however, is weaker for younger female researchers who spread more evenly across fields.