RICARD GREBOL
PhD candidate in Economics,
Uppsala University
ricard.grebol@nek.uu.se
Research
Teaching
I am a fifth-year PhD candidate in Economics at Uppsala University. I am a labour economist studying minimum wages, job search, and inequality. I also work on political economy and economic history.
You can find my CV here.
Draft coming soon
with Margarita Machelett, Jan Stuhler, and Ernesto Villanueva
We study the evolution of intergenerational educational mobility and related distributional statistics in Spain. Over recent decades, mobility has risen by one-third, coinciding with pronounced declines in inequality and assortative mating among the same cohorts. To explore these patterns, we examine regional correlates of mobility, using split-sample techniques. A key finding from both national and regional analyses is the close association between mobility and assortative mating: spousal sorting accounts for nearly half of the regional variation in intergenerational correlations and also appears to be a key mediator of the negative relationship between inequality and mobility documented in recent studies.
with Cristian Navarro
In autocracies, personnel decisions often prioritize ideological alignment over merit. We investigate how such ideology-based personnel selection shapes the quality of the public workforce and its implications for state capacity. We examine this in the context of a large-scale political purge and reorganization of primary school teachers carried out by the Francoist dictatorship following the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). We construct a novel dataset linking newly digitized purge archives and administrative records that track teacher careers, and document that more competent teachers were disproportionately dismissed and that average experience declined by about 2.6 years (14.4%). Local shortages created by the purge were partly offset by regime efforts to reassign teachers across municipalities, yet coordination frictions in this process left persistent staffing deficits that spread to areas less affected by the purge. Our findings show how ideology-based personnel reforms can erode public workforce expertise and weaken the state's capacity to deliver essential services, providing a mechanism through which autocratic consolidation entails sizable capacity costs.
with Boris Ginzburg and Jan Stuhler
with Lena Hensvik, Thomas Le Barbanchon, and Oskar Nordström Skans
with Cristian Navarro and Luca Repetto
with Boris Ginzburg, Jan Stuhler, and Milica Vranic
with Margarita Machelett and Jan Stuhler
In Economía de la Desigualdad, Fundación Ramón Areces, 2026.
with Judit Vall Castelló
PLOS ONE, 16(5), 2021.