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The institutional and organizational details framing legislative processes are key aspects for understanding how Congresses work. From a new institutional economics perspective, this paper comparatively examines how the Spanish and USA Congresses are organized. The main purpose of the paper is to unveil the so-called "black box" factors operating in each case. The role played by property rights, hierarchy, individual deputies, leadership, transactions costs and committees will be researched. Whereas committees and decision-making rules based on a property rights system are key factors for understanding how the Congress performs in USA; in the Spanish case the most relevant explanatory factors are strong party leadership and the hierarchical rules by which political parties and parliamentary groups are organized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides empirical evidence about the relationship between wages and their determinants in the Spanish economy from a macroeconomic perspective, as well as about the adjustment speed back to long run equilibrium, estimating an error correction mechanism by non-linear methods. The results reveal that the unemployment rate and the bargaining variables have no effect on the evolution of wages. The variable that explains the evolution of wages in the long term is prices, with wages showing slightly inflationary behavior . In the short term, wages are explained by their past values, reflecting a nominal inertia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The autocorrelation in stock returns is one of the most important anomalies in financial markets worldwide. In this paper, we have investigated differences in return autocorrelation on a day-to-day basis in the Spanish and French stock markets. Our research provides strong evidence of the importance of non-trading periods, not only weekends and holidays but also overnight closings, to explain return autocorrelation anomalies. While close-to-close stock returns are highly autocorrelated, specially on Mondays, when we compute daily returns on an open-to-close basis they do not exhibit a significant level of autocorrelation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How much power to tax do really enjoy the seventeen new regional governments created in democratic Spain? What other sources of income do they dispose of? Which rules have been implemented for regulating their tax and non-tax sources of income and how are these rules influencing the behaviour of relevant political agents? These are the questions addressed in the present paper. Although no econometric estimation has to my knowledge been provided yet, the arguments and figures provided indicate that the political mobilization and the overspending incentive generated at this level of government must be considered key factors in any explanatory model of the surprising path of growth and development registered in Spain since the mid 1980s. Physical and human capital stocks increased at a spectacular rate so as to substantially narrow the gap, in comparison to European standards, that had been generated over the previous forty years of dictatorship. Public deficits and outstanding public debt remained under control. Spanish per capita real GDP soared from 2,536 Euros in 1980 to 19,456 in 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]