This paper studies the organization of the internal labour market of postal services in Spain from 1890 to 1935. The paper discusses the evolution of total employment in relation to postal traffic and average nominal and real wages. The paper then analyses the operation of the internal labour...

Stabilizing and liberalizing policies are key elements of the Washington Consensus. This paper adds a historical dimension to the ongoing debate by assessing the economic impact of market-oriented reforms undertaken during General Franco’s dictatorship, the 1959 Stabilization and...

The Spanish 2nd Republic (1931-1936) witnessed one of the fastest and deepest processes of popular mobilization in interwar Europe, generating a decisive reactionary wave that brought the country to the Civil War (1936-1939). We show in the paper that both contemporary comment and part of the...

The paper explores the relationship between language and economy, between text and context, through a case study: the Basque region in northern Spain during World War I and the immediate postwar years. Using some tools of quantitative and qualitative analysis, I try to dissect the process of...

The paper analyses the legal transfer of formal rules regulating stock markets in Spain between 1800 and 1936. We argue that the transfer of French legislation in the 1830s provoked a “transplant effect”, which generated serious distortions in Spanish financial markets. As a result, Spain...

From a long-term perspective, technological innovation could have come from local or domestic inventive and research activity, or from the transfer of foreign technology. In reality either option produces similar effects and often it was a combination of both which drove the historical...

In this paper we will explore how international corporations used the Spanish patent system in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century in order to discover what the actual effects of its apparent weakness were. The origins and evolution of corporate patenting...

El trabajo efectúa un análisis de la evolución del sector ferroviario durante la Guerra Civil española (1936-1939). Se trata de un tema que hasta el momento ha recibido una escasa atención y que consideramos puede ayudar a comprender el comportamiento de uno de los principales sectores...

This paper is an attempt at assessing the economic impact of market-oriented reforms undertaken during General Franco’s dictatorship, in particular, the 1959 Stabilization and Liberalization Plan. Using an index of macroeconomic distortions (IMD) the relationship between economic policies and...