The observed high levels of banks’ operating efficiency, profi ts and market values in the years before the financial crisis raise reasonable doubts about the information content of conventional performance measures for the accurate assessment of the efficiency of banking intermediation. In...

This paper examines the contribution of investments in Information Technology (IT) and in advertising to the output and profits of Spanish banks, in the period 1983-2003. We find that the growth in the stock of IT capital explains one third of output growth of banks, and that an additional...

This paper examines the nature of competition in the Spanish banking industry during the years before and after Spain joined the European Monetary Union (EMU). The paper models competition in a product-differentiated market where banks choose from a list of price (interest rates of loans and...

We examine the consequences of imposing higher capital requirements on banks (as under Basel III or, recently, in the case of large banks in the European context) for bank dynamics in complying with the new standards and for the long-term effects on bank lending rates and the demand for bank...

This paper tests the opportunity-cost theory using a panel of Spanish firms during the period 1991-2010. Under this theory, productivity-enhancing activities, such as R&D investment, should increase during downturns because of the fall in their relative cost – in terms of forgone output –....

We use a unique administrative dataset of Spanish exporters to document the existence of exporters’ geographical agglomeration by export destination. We reveal that firms selling to countries with worse business regulations, a dissimilar language and a different currency tend to cluster...

The main contribution of this paper is to jointly estimate the effects of financial development and inflation on growth. We aim to exploit both the cross-section and the time-series dimension of the data on inflation, growth and some banking and stock market indicators over the period 1961-1993...

This paper explores the dynamics of price-cost mark-ups using firm-level data, paying particular attention to the crisis period 2008-2011. To this end, we apply the econometric framework developed by Klette (1999) to a comprehensive sample of Spanish non-financial corporations in order to...

This paper uses a well-established growth accounting framework to measure the contribution of ICT goods (considered as capital inputs) to output and labour productivity growth in the Spanish economy. We apply this framework to a sample of around 1300 Spanish firms per year over the period...

We have constructed a new database aimed at the study of the relation between firm demography and labour productivity, with a large number of Spanish firms from both industry and service sectors. This database allows us to analyze in detail the degree of dispersion and persistence of...