Spain: an eventful history of economic crises

There is talk that Spain could get dragged into a financial crisis. While it is debatable whether this will happen or not, and whether it is inevitable, it is instructive to study Spain's economic history in this regard.

Concha Betrán, Pablo Martín-­‐Aceña and María Pons look at a century and a half of data and basically do in more details for Spain what Carmen Reinhardt and Kenneth Rogoff did for many countries in their best seller. And as the latter book, the picture is depressing. Crises of all sorts were a rather regular occurrence, we have been just blessed with rather few of them over the last half century. For example, in the second half of the 2oth century, Spain experiences half a dozen currency crises, a couple of banking crises, three periods with negative stock returns over several years, and the IMF had to intervene three times for a debt crisis. It takes from this that while crises are becoming less frequent, they still occur, and the current one was long overdue.

Referee home bias

Referees are supposed to be impartial. In academics, this is most of the time helped by the fact that they are anonymous. In sports, referees are public and meeting participants, including spectators, try to influence them. This becomes particularly relevant when the referee has to take a decision against the home team than leaves spectators irate. They could retaliate against him. Does this influence referees?


Andrés Picazo-Tadeo, Francisco Gónzalez-Gómez and Jorge Guardiola Wanden-Berghe look at first division football in Spain, carefully taking into account stadium capacity, how full it is, how far spectators are from the pitch, and referee experience. They find that awarding a free kick does not have a home bias, which is consistent with the fact that this is a split-second decision. The ensuing decision to give the offending player a caution is, however, affected by home bias. This decision is not instantaneous, and social pressure can be exerted on the referee, especially when the stadium is full. The presence of a running track that separates the local supporters form the action does not seem to matter, though. I wonder whether some teams have a larger home bias than others, as the fans' reputation could also influence referees.