The literature on immigrant assimilation has highlighted the imperfect portability of human capital. Recent studies have dealt with this issue from the perspective of over-education. This study analyses the portability of immigrants’ human capital into the Spanish job market. The results obtained indicate differing degrees of the transferability of human...

This paper examines the impact of urban sprawl, a phenomenon of particular interest in Spain, which is currently experiencing this process of rapid, low-density urban expansion. Many adverse consequences are attributed to urban sprawl (e.g., traffic congestion, air pollution and social segregation), though here we are concerned primarily with the...

The implementation of public programs to support business R&D projects requires the establishment of a selection process. This selection process faces various difficulties, which include the measurement of the impact of the R&D projects as well as selection process optimization among projects with multiple, and sometimes incomparable, performance indicators. To...

This paper examines the effects of agglomeration economies (AE) on the sensitivity of firm location to tax differentials. An initial reading of the story suggests that, with AE, when a firm moves into a community attracted by a tax reduction, other firms may decide to move in as well. This...

In the economic literature various political institutions designed to control the government have been analyzed. However, an important institution has been neglected so far: independent auditing institutions with an extended mandate to analyze the budget draft and individual policy proposals. We argue that auditors with an extended mandate improve transparency...

In this paper we test the hypothesis that intergovernmental grants allocated to co- partisans buy more political support than grants allocated to local governments controlled by opposition parties. We use a rich Spanish database containing information about the grants received by 617 municipalities during the period 1993-2003 from two different...