This paper offers further evidence to “The Economist” index of economic power developed by Pujol (2003). The original index is composite by construction and it gives information about year 2000, comparing the results with year 1990. Also econometric evidence is offered. Testing the...

This paper studies the decentralization process of public spending in Spain, which has been one of the main landmarks in recent years, and not only in Spain but also in many different countries. The classical assumption to speak about this kind of processes is the theory of fiscal federalism....

The present work analyzes the different positions of the different political parties in Spain with respect to the new General Law of Budgetary Discipline. In this sense, the paper extracts the relevant information about this law from the different parliamentary debates. First, we elaborate a...

This book compiles huge information, maybe the largest in Spain, about the Spanish decentralization process. Even if the decentralization is still a working issue in Spain, we can say that the main a most important footstep took place during the period 1984-1998. This is precisely the period...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

We develop a model to show that cartels that produce goods with lower durability are easier to sustain implicitly. This observation gen- erates the following results: 1) implicit cartels have an incentive to pro- duce goods with an inefficiently low level of durability; 2) a monopoly or explicit...

In this paper, a promotion tournament is considered, where, at the beginning of the tournament, it is unknown how long the tournament lasts. Further, the promotion decision is based on the assessments of a supervisor with imperfect recall. In line with psychological research, the supervisor is...

Policy makers often decide to liberalize foreign bank entry but at the same time restrict the mode of entry. We study how different entry modes affect the interest rate for loans in a model in which domestic banks possess private information about their incumbent clients but foreign banks have...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004The explicit or implicit protection of banks through government bail-out policies is a universal phenomenon. We analyze the competitive effects of such policies in two models with different degrees of transparency in the...

In the 1990s, patenting schemes changed in many respects: upcoming new technologies accelerated the shift from price competition towards competition based on technical inventions, a worldwide surge in patenting took place, and the ‘patent thicket’ arose as a consequence of strategic...