The purpose of the article is to make a first appraisal of the contribution of the railway of Iberian gauge (Renfe) to the economic development experienced by the Spanish society throughout the second half of the 20th century. The text examine in the first place the benefits obtained by the...

Recent research has determined the existence of a border effect on trade flows within a country associated to agglomeration economies, the size of the spatial unit of reference, as well as to alternative measures of transport costs. Using a micro-database on road freight shipments within Spain...

We discuss how to properly decompose economic efficiency when the underlying technology is non-homothetic using alternative allocative and technical efficiency criteria. We first show that only under the production of one output and assuming the particular case of constant returns to scale...

An article in Science (4 November 1960) proposed Friday 13 November AD 2026 as the "Doomsday" of planet Earth, a doomsday produced by the "world population" going to infinity. In that paper, a rudimentary rate equation describing the evolution of the world population with time, was approximated...

We analyze the strategic decision of firms to voluntarily certify corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in a context where other firms can falsely pretend to be socially responsible. Equilibrium outcomes are crucially determined by consumers' beliefs about the credibility of firms' CSR...

We use the multiregional core-periphery model of the new economic geography to analyze and compare the agglomeration and dispersion forces shaping the location of economic activity for a continuum of network topologies characterized by their degree of centrality, and comprised between two...

Apart from the well-known weaknesses of the standard Malmquist productivity index related to infeasibility and not accounting for slacks, already addressed in the literature, we identify a new and significant drawback of the Malmquist-Luenberger index decomposition that questions its validity as...

During the nineteenth century Spain did not import the majority of Cuban tobacco, nor was most of it consumed in Spain. Spain neither consumed nor re-exported Cuban tobacco. Cuban tobacco, due to its high quality, was too expensive to be able to compete with tobacco of lesser quality which was,...

Majority voting is commonly used in aggregating judgments. The literature to date on judgment aggregation (JA) has focused primarily on proposition-wise majority voting (PMV). Given a set of issues on which a group is trying to make collective judgments, PMV aggregates individual judgments issue...

The UN data (1950-2010) and projections (both medium and low-fertility variants for 2015-2040) show that fertility rates are already below replacement level in all continents except Africa. In this paper we develop a simple new approach for population projections based on a Improved Rate...