This study examines wage inequality in the Spanish labour market from a regional perspective, drawing on stochastic dominance techniques. The main findings are, firstly, that wage inequality exhibits a significant regional heterogeneity and, secondly, that the reduction of wage inequality in the Spanish labour market in recent years is a general phenomenon. It is also observed that regional differences in workforce heterogeneity and the mix of jobs and workplaces and their returns are influential factors in the explanation of regional heterogeneity in the levels of wage inequality.

This article examines firm characteristics associated with the probability of relocating part of the activity in a foreign country. Using manufacturing firms’ micro data for the 1999-2005 period, we find evidence that cost-cutting objectives are the main determinants for offshoring production, that firms with lower profits are more likely to undertake in-house offshoring, and that imports from low-wage countries increase the likelihood that part of the activity will be relocated. We also find that most offshoring firms are foreign – nearly 76% of the total.

We examine to what extent immigrant school performance is affected by the characteristics of the neighborhoods that they grow up in. We address this issue using a refugee placement policy which provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden. The main result is that school performance is increasing in the number of highly educated adults sharing the subject’s ethnicity. A standard deviation increase in the fraction of high-educated in the assigned neighborhood raises compulsory school GPA by 0.9 percentile ranks. This magnitude corresponds to a tenth of the performance gap between refugee immigrant and native- born children.

This study examines how the extent of entrepreneurship education within university departments influences students’ entrepreneurial intentions in three careers: computer science, electrical engineering, and business. Specifically, it proposes that the effect of such education is (1) contingent on its mode (active, e.g. business plan seminars, vs. reflective, e.g. theory lectures), (2) contingent on the regional context and (3) complemented by individual-level influences such as role models or work experience. Results show that active modes of entrepreneurship education directly increase intentions and attitudes, whereas the impact of reflective modes depends on the regional context. Parental role models and work experience are found to complement entrepreneurship education in different ways. The findings have important implications for theory building as well as for the practice of teaching entrepreneurship.

Several theoretical papers that examine tax competition with agglomeration effects have stressed the possibility that the governments of jurisdictions in which economic activity is concentrated may tax firms more heavily (taxable agglomeration rents). In this paper, we examine the tax rate setting decisions taken with regard to the Spanish municipal business tax (Impuesto sobre Actividades Económicas). The analysis, carried out with a sample of 2,772 municipalities, focuses on the effect that urbanization economies, localization economies and the market potential of municipalities have on their business tax rates. High urbanization economies and high localization economies are found to increase the business tax rate. Although the evidence is weaker, the results also indicate that municipalities with better access to demand (of consumers) set higher tax rates.

PhD graduates hold the highest education degree, are trained to conduct research and can be considered a key element in the creation, commercialization and diffusion of innovations. The impact of PhDs on innovation and economic development takes place through several channels such as the accumulation of scientific capital stock, the enhancement of technology transfers and the promotion of cooperation relationships in innovation processes. Although the placement of PhDs in industry provides a very important mechanism for transmitting knowledge from universities to firms, information about the characteristics of the firms that employ PhDs is very scarce. The goal of this paper is to improve understanding of the determinants of the demand for PhDs in the private sector. Three main potential determinants of the demand for PhDs are considered: cooperation between firms and universities, R&D activities of firms and several characteristics of firms, size, sector, productivity and age. The results from the econometric analysis show that cooperation between firms and universities encourages firms to recruit PhDs and point to the existence of accumulative effects in the hiring of PhD graduates.