This working paper quantifies, at a regional level (NUTS3), terrain ruggedness, and compares it with the average altitude of the region. Altitude is an often-used variable introduced in gravitational models of population or activity location as a measure of physical geography, to pick up a...

Las intensas transformaciones registradas por la economía mundial a lo largo de los últimos veinticinco años han modificado profundamente la naturaleza y magnitud de los flujos comerciales entre países. La incorporación de grandes potencias emergentes al sistema económico internacional ha...

This working paper presents a simple and locally optimal test statistic for the Pareto law. The test is based on the Lagrange multiplier (LM) principle and can be computed easily once the maximum likelihood estimator of the scale parameter of the Pareto density has been obtained. A Monte Carlo...

This working paper analyzes the role played by two dimensions of entrepreneurs’ private social capital in the performance of an entrepreneurial venture: local size and degree of preferential linking. To fulfill this objective, we build a bi-dimensional measure of social capital based on...

This working paper analyzes the performance of the Spanish educational system according to the 2006 PISA report, focussing on the equality of opportunity. The basic idea is that a good educational system should produce outcomes that depend basically on the students effort and not on the students...

This working paper presents a new scoring algorithm for the SF-6D, one of the most popular preference-based health status measures. Previous algorithms suffer from a phenomenon called the floor effect (i.e., lack of sensitivity of the instrument for detecting health gains of individuals whose...

This collective work sets out to expound, justify and apply, in 'specific proposals', the purest principles of rationality and economic, legal and constitutional consistency in order to improve and enlighten the debate on the system of autonomous region financing. It examines how the system has...

This work falls within the regional growth studies series which the Foundation has developed over the past several years. It examines the basic traits of the region s economic growth since halfway through the twentieth century. The main focus of its contents is the relationship between physical...

The closing volume in the regional studies series developed by the BBVA Foundation in partnership with Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas (Valencian Economic Research Institute). This monographic work looks at the economic performance of Asturias over the more than four decades...

Tras la intensa crisis económica de los últimos años, la economía española comienza a dar signos de recuperación, mostrando una senda positiva de crecimiento. Sin embargo, todavía quedan debilidades y amenazas que hay que afrontar, entre las que destaca el elevado nivel de deuda de las...