This paper analyzes the role of religious conflict in the process of development of a country. We construct an index of religious polarization using data on the proportions of each religion in a country. The index of polarization is an alternative to the usual fragmentation index. We argue that...

This paper analyzes the relationship between human capital and convergence with a model that takes into account the different effects of human capital accumulation on regional convergence. As an input, human capital produces convergence due to both decreasing returns and public intervention on...

Este trabajo aporta evidencia acerca de la importancia de los ingresos de divisas por turismo en el crecimiento económico español experimentado en las últimas tres décadas. Los resultados econométricos indican que existe una relación de largo plazo entre el crecimiento de la renta del...

In this paper we analyze firms' ability to tacitly collude on pricesin an infinitely repeated duopoly game of vertical productdifferentiation. We show that firms collude if and only if their discountfactor is high enough, i.e. if they value future profits sufficiently. We alsoshow that a lower...

Competition has long been regarded as productivity enhancing. Understanding the mechanism by which competition affects innovation and productivity is therefore an important topic for economic policy. The main contribution of this paper is to disentangle the relationship between competition and...

This paper contains an analysis of the economic effects of human capital onproduction, measured as Gross Value Added per full-time equivalent worker. To thisend, a Cobb-Douglas type production function has been used, with Gross Value Added(GVA) a function of human capital and private and public...

In this paper, we show that downstream mergers increase the incentives of an up-stream firm to invest in cost-reducing R&D. The upstream firm revenues increase with industry profits, which in turn increase with concentration downstream and this explains the positive link between concentration...

In the context of the recent electricity market reforms in Europe and the US, we evaluate the performance of the Spanish pool. Our method is not based on price-cost estimates but rather on the different behavior of operators with higher market power as compared to the behavior of more...

In this paper we explore the relationship between the spatial agglomeration of economic activity and regional economic growth in Spain during the period 1870-1930. The study allows us to revisit the existence of a trade-off between economic growth and territorial cohesion and also to examine...

This paper analyses the evolution of competition in the Mexican banking system in the period 1993-2005, a period of deregulation, liberalization and consolidation of the sector. For this purpose we use two indicators of competition from the theory of industrial organization (the Lerner index and...