In the last days of the electoral campaign for the 2004 general election in Spain, on Thursday March 11th 2004, a series of simultaneous terror attacks caused the death of 191 persons in commuting trains in the capital Madrid. Four days later, the opposition party won the election, against all...

While conventional farming systems face serious problems of sustainability, organic agriculture is seen as a more environmentally friendly system as it favours renewable resources, recycles nutrients, uses the environment’s own systems for controlling pests and diseases, sustains ecosystems, protects soils, and reduces pollution. At the same time organic farming promotes...

The main aim of this paper is to examine the effect of the educational institution, and, specifically, its public or private ownership on the results of the Spanish education system. The empirical analysis is based on the application of multilevel regression techniques on data from OECD PISA-2003. The results of...

The present paper analyses the link between firms’ decisions to innovate and the barriers that prevent them from being innovative. The aim is twofold. First, it analyses three groups of barriers to innovation: the cost of innovation projects, lack of knowledge and market conditions. Second, it presents the main steps...

We examine the economic and political determinants of decisions taken by local governments regarding the amount of new land to be assigned for development. The analysis draws on a massive database, which includes more than 2,000 Spanish municipalities during the 1999-2003 term-of-office. The increase in developable land in this period...

This empirical work studies the influence of immigrant students on individuals’ school choice in one of the most populated regions in Spain: Catalonia. It has estimated, following the Poisson model, the probability that a certain school, which immigrant students are already attending, may be chosen by natives as well as...