ABSTRACT Following Bossert (1995), we consider a model where personal income depends on two different characteristics: skills and effort. Luttens (2010) introduces claims that individuals have over aggregate income and that only depend on the effort they exert. Moreover, he proposes redistribution mechanisms in which solidarity is based on changes in a lower bound on…
Abstract: Under the Ancien Régime in Spain local granaries (in Spanish, pósitos) acted as welfare institutions designed to help small farmers in times of crisis. During the first third of the twentieth century they were subject to an intense reorganisation in Spain and this transformed them into the only microfinance institution to which a significant part of the…
Abstract: This article presents a dynamic growth model with energy as an input in the production function. The available stock of energy resources is ordered by a quality parameter based on energy accounting: the “Energy Return on Energy Invested” (EROI). In our knowledge this is the first paper where EROI fits in a neoclassical growth…
ABSTRACT In this paper, we propose a nonparametric statistical tool to identify the most relevant lag in the model description of a time series. It is also shown that it can be used for model identification. The statistic is based on the number of runs, when the time series is symbolized depending on the empirical…
ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to propose a newly developed non-parametric test for linear and nonlinear causality based on permutation entropy and to show its usefulness in analyzing the potential causal relationship between trading volume and security prices. Most of the empirical applications and tests for causality rely on using Granger causality based…
ABSTRACT This paper explores the link between specialization across goods and specialization within goods along the quality dimension. It develops a tractable many-country, many-industry Ricar- dian model with an integer number of heterogeneous firms producing each good, under a generic assumption about the distributions of firm e ciencies. In equilibrium, each country exports a range…
ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyse the strategies employed by the Rothschilds up to 1940 to gain control and limit competition in the international non-ferrous metals markets. It examines how they opted for inelastic demand products of highly concentrated supply which lent themselves to market control (mercury, nickel, lead, and copper and…
ABSTRACT Background In January 2011 Spain modified clean air legislation in force since 2006, removing all existing exceptions applicable to hospitality venues. Although this legal reform was backed by all political parties with parliamentary representation, the government’s initiative was contested by the tobacco industry and its allies in the hospitality industry. One of the most…
ABSTRACT The Spanish business code allowed firms two types of organizational flexibility in the late 19th and early 20th century. Firms enjoyed great leeway in adapting rules to their needs. The corporation was especially flexible in this way. Spanish law also allowed firms to in effect crea- te their own legal form. Until 1920, firms…
ABSTRACT We analyze the potential trade-off between product variety and consumer information and the implications this trade-off has for product quality. We introduce a simple information accumulation process in a horizontal differentiation model with unobservable quality. As the number of brands increases, per-brand consumer information decreases, which leads to lower average quality. Eventually, the reduction…
