This paper studies the duration pattern of …xed-term contracts and the determinants of their conversion into permanent ones in Spain, where the share of …xed-term employment is the highest in Europe. We estimate a duration model for temporary employment, with competing risks of terminating into permanent employment versus alternative states, and ‡exible duration dependence. We …nd that conversion rates are generally below 10%. Our estimated conversion rates roughly increase with tenure, with a pronounced spike at the legal limit, when there is no legal way to retain the worker on a temporary contract. We argue that estimated di¤erences in conversion rates across categories of workers can stem from di¤erences in worker outside options and thus the power to credibly threat to quit temporary jobs.

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We examine the degree to which women's fertility decisions depend on greater gender symmetry in child care. We analyse second births and focus particularly on the importance of fatherly care for women with a strong career orientation. Exploiting the European Community Household Panel, we use event-history techniques and compare Denmark and Spain, two countries that represent the European extremes in terms of both fertility and public support for working mothers. Compared to the Spanish case, Danish women are more likely to have a second child, in general because welfare state support makes reconciliation of motherhood and careers easier. We show that Danish career women are additionally able to reduce the opportunity cost of motherhood via enhanced fatherly child care due to bargaining between the spouses.

We propose a new methodology for measuring intergenerational mobility in economic wellbeing. Our method is based on the joint distribution of surnames and economic outcomes. It circumvents the need for intergenerational panel data, a long-standing stumbling block for understanding mobility. It does so by using cross-sectional data alongside a calibrated structural model in order to recover the traditional intergenerational elasticity measures. Our main idea is simple. If 'inheritance' is important for economic outcomes, then rare surnames should predict economic outcomes in the cross-section. This is because rare surnames are indicative of familial linkages. If the number of rare surnames is small this approach will not work. However, rare surnames are abundant in the highly-skewed nature of surname distributions from most Western societies. We develop a model that articulates this idea and shows that the more important is inheritance, the more informative will be surnames. This result is robust to a variety of different assumptions about fertility and mating. We apply our method using the 2001 census from Catalonia, a large region of Spain. We use educational attainment as a proxy for overall economic well-being. A calibration exercise results in an estimate of the intergenerational correlation of educational attainment of 0.60. We also find evidence suggesting that mobility has decreased among the different generations of the 20th century. A complementary analysis based on sibling correlations confirms our results and provides a robustness check on our method. Our model and our data allow us to examine one possible explanation for the observed decrease in mobility. We find that the degree of assortative mating has increased over time. Overall, we argue that our method has promise because it can tap the vast mines of census data that are available in a heretofore unexploited manner.