We provide a theoretical model for designing academic spin-off contracts between the university Technology Transfer Office (TTO), the researcher and the venture capitalist. The optimal contract entails the allocation of founder shares to the researcher to secure her participation in the venture,...

This working paper proposes two considerations prior to the study of city size and emphasizes their importance in the testing of one of the empirical regularities most widely used by the literature, Zipf s law. The first refers to the importance of using a consistent database for analysis. The...

The contracting out policy is one of the new instruments for the new public management. On the beginning of a new era, governments must face the implications of a increasing demand for new services, and an improved quality of the already existent ones, together with a growing needs for new...

This article features a set of indicators designed to measure international economic integration and globalization. We analyze the degree of openness and the respective networks of connections-both direct and indirect-for each economy in our sample. Our indicators are based on network analysis...

This working paper surveys the determinants of the significant real exchange rate appreciations experienced by the currencies of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries with respect to the euro since the mid 1990s. After analysing the reasons why the Balassa-Samuelson model cannot account...

This working paper reviews the key costs and benefits of high speed rail (HSR) investments. It also discusses, as case studies, several proposals of HSR lines in Britain and the existing Madrid-Seville corridor. It finally develops a model to investigate the demand conditions under which high...

This working paper sets out the findings of the «Survey of expert users: court representatives» conducted in the framework of the BBVA Foundation s Forum on Judicial Reform and Management. The technical features of this survey are attached as an Appendix. This research offers a new overview of...

Over the last few years there has been a remarkableincrease in the number of published studies dealingwith social capital issues. A plethora of studies hasalso analyzed the efficiency of several banking industries.In this article we merge the two literatures byanalyzing how social capital...

We study the earning structure and the equilibrium assignment of workers to firms in a model where workers have social preferences and skills are perfectly substitutable in production. We allow firms to offer long-term contracts and for frictions in the labour market in the form of mobility...

This study explores the relationship between education and unemployment and the role of the unemployment trap in that relation. The main distinctive element compared to other studies is the introduction of the educational level as the central variable in the analysis. The empirical analysis,...