Un tema ampliamente debatido en la literatura económica es hasta qué punto las mejoras en transporte generan un impacto positivo sobre la actividad económica. Desde una perspectiva macroeconómica, son múltiples los estudios que han confirmado que una mejor dotación de infraestructuras favorece el crecimiento económico. Más recientemente, esta relación se ha contrastado a partir de un enfoque microeconómico que evalúa el efecto de las infraestructuras sobre el comportamiento de las empresas. La hipótesis subyacente es que la infraestructura, al mejorar la accesibilidad a los mercados, tiene un efecto positivo sobre la productividad de las empresas que se benefician.

La defensa, además de representar un servicio público y de constituir una actividad productiva, genera impactos económicos sobre el resto de sectores de la economía, como consecuencia de las interacciones existentes entre los diferentes sectores implicados. Los principales resultados del estudio de impacto económico de las actividades asociadas a la defensa en la economía española, en el que han participado investigadores de la Cátedra de Mercados y Política Industrial, una unidad de investigación del IEB financiada por ISDEFE, muestran que los efectos son especialmente relevantes en los sectores de mayor contenido tecnológico e intensidad en el uso del conocimiento.

El segmento del transporte de la electricidad, unánimemente considerado un monopolio natural, es un aspecto clave del buen funcionamiento de la liberalización del conjunto del sector eléctrico. Un sector donde las actividades competitivas se centran en los segmentos de generación y comercialización, cuyo nexo de unión es precisamente el transporte. El transporte de electricidad en alta tensión agrupa un conjunto numeroso de funciones que son separables en dos grandes bloques:

Do governments increase public employment in election years? This paper answers this question by using data from Sweden and Finland, two countries that are similar in many respects but in which local elections are held at different points in time. These facts make it possible for us to separate an election effect from other time effects. Our results indicate that there is a statistically significant election year effect in local public employment, a production factor that is highly visible in the welfare services provided by the local governments in the Scandinavian countries. The effect also seems to be economically significant; the municipalities employ 0.6 more full-time employees per 1,000 capita in election years than in other years (which correspond to an increase by approximately 1 percent).

Human capital, scientific research, and technology are the three chief mechanisms promoting knowledge spillovers from universities to firms. Based on a study of the impact of Spain’s 1983 University Reform Act (LRU), which opened the door to the foundation of new universities and faculties, this paper examines whether university (or faculty) location affects the creation of new firms within a given province. We conclude that the foundation of science and social science faculties has had a marked impact on the creation of firms.

Anecdotal evidence and recent empirical work suggest that music piracy has differential effects on artists depending on their popularity. Existing theoretical literature cannot explain such differential effects since it is exclusively concerned with single-firm models. We present a model with two types of artists who differ in their popularity. We assume that the costs of illegal downloads increase with the scarcity of a recording, and that scarcity is negatively related to the artist’s popularity. Moreover, we allow for a second source of revenues for artists apart from CD sales. These alternative revenues depend on an artist’s recognition as measured by the number of consumers who obtain his recording either by purchasing the original or downloading a copy. Our findings for the more popular artist generalize a result found by Gayer and Shy (2006) who show that piracy is beneficial to the artist when alternative revenues are important. In our model, however, this does not carry over to the less popular artist, who is often harmed by piracy even when alternative revenues are important. We conclude that piracy tends to reduce musical variety.