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We exploit the GEOSTAT 2011 population grid with a very high 1 km2 resolution to document that Spain presents the lowest density of settlements among European countries. Only a small fraction of the Spanish territory is inhabited, particularly in its southern half, which goes hand in hand with a high degree of population concentration. We uncover through standard regression analysis and spatial regression discontinuity that this anomaly cannot be accounted for by adverse geographic and climatic conditions. The second part of the paper takes a historical perspective on Spain's settlement patterns by showing that the spatial distribution of the population has been very persistent in the last two centuries, and that the abnormally low density of settlements with respect to European neighbors was already visible in the 19th century, which indicates that this phenomenon has not emerged recently as a consequence of the transformations associated with industrialization and tertiarization. Using data on ancient sites, we find that Spain did not feature scarcity of settlements in comparison to other countries in premedieval times, suggesting that its current anomalous settlement pattern has not always existed and is, therefore, not intrinsic to its geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper performs a meta‐regression analysis to derive the role of techniques, data and variable's definition on the effect of the labor‐market determinants on interregional migration. We use Spain as a case of study, a country with heterogeneous and even counterintuitive behavior of internal migration flows to its labor‐market drivers. We use data from studies released over the last 40 years. The results show that migration flows respond to labor‐market differentials in a theoretically consistent way. We find that the vast diversity in the studies' attributes is behind the significant heterogeneity of their estimated effects. Differences in aggregation level, variables measures, model specification, and the national economic context influence the identification of the push and pull effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relationship between government efficiency—an important dimension of quality of government—and economic growth at the municipal level in 1,820 Spanish municipalities during the period 2008–2015. At this level of disaggregation, the literature is virtually nonexistent due to severe data constraints. The efficiency of local government provides an accurate indicator of how good local authorities are in managing their budget. This variable is expected to be highly correlated with other more traditional quality of government indicators, such as corruption. After computing our measure, we then use it in a growth regression framework. We find a dominant positive effect of government efficiency on income per capita growth, which is robust to a wide variety of scenarios. Our findings also suggest that increases in local government quality are particularly rewarding for the poorest municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the long‐term transformations of the occupational structure in 50 provinces of Spain with a view to ascertain the existence and assess the extent of employment polarization. The peculiar characteristics of this country, namely rigid labor markets and the relatively recent transition to democracy, make for an interesting addition to existing studies on this topic. In line with previous literature on other countries, we find a strong association between the decline of "routine" mid‐skill jobs and the expansion of low‐skill service employment as well as differential labor market outcomes by levels of formal education. Results are robust to various controls and instrumental variables that account for long‐term industry specialization. We also find a positive local multiplier effect of high‐skilled workers on the demand for nontradable service jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: This paper studies the vertical and horizontal interactions between federal and regional governments in terms of public deficits. Recent studies commonly restraint budget slippages to the incentives created by the institutional arrangements within a country. Alternatively, we estimate here a fiscal reaction function for the Spanish regions over the period 1995–2010, paying special attention to the impact of the federal fiscal stance on regional fiscal imbalances. Our results indicate that higher public deficits for the central government encourage larger fiscal imbalances at the regional level. This vertical interaction is interpreted in the context of yardstick competition models. We also find a significant impact from fiscal decisions taken by governments at the same decision‐making tier in a specific region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper provides a bridge between the literature examining the economic impact of air services and the literature analyzing the determinants of bilateral FDI flows. I estimate a gravity equation for the determinants of bilateral FDI flows between the Spanish region of Catalonia, home to the airport of Barcelona, and countries of all over the world for the period 2002-2015. I find evidence that the reduction in travel time due to the availability of nonstop flights scheduled with sufficient frequency increases the amount of FDI due to the enhanced transmission of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between the level of public infrastructure and the level of productivity using panel data for the Spanish provinces over the period 1985-2004, a period that is particularly relevant due to the substantial changes occurring in the Spanish economy at that time. The underlying model used for the data analysis is based on the wage equation, which is one of a handful of simultaneous equations which when satisfied correspond to the short-run equilibrium of New Economic Geography (NEG) theory. This is estimated using various spatial panel models with either fixed or random effects to allow for individual heterogeneity. Using these models, we find consistent evidence that productivity depends directly on the public capital stock endowment of each province, but also there is evidence of negative spillover effects from changes in capital stock in neighboring provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper evaluates the impact of accessibility on the productivity of Spanish manufacturing firms. We suggest the use of accessibility indicators of workers and commodities, integrating transport, land use, and individual components, computing real distances or traveling times using the Spanish full road network. Estimated firms' total factor productivity is explained as a function of the accessibility indicators and additional control variables. Results evidence the crucial role on firms' productivity to the accessibility of commodities and to a slightly lesser extent the workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The objective of this paper is to analyze why firms in some industries locate in specialized economic environments (localization economies) while those in other industries prefer large city locations (urbanization economies). To this end, we examine the location decisions of new manufacturing firms in Spain at the city level and for narrowly defined industries. First, we estimate firm location models to obtain estimates that reflect the importance of localization and urbanization economies in each industry. Then, we regress these estimates on industry characteristics related to the potential importance of labor market pooling, input sharing, and knowledge spillovers. Urbanization effects are high in knowledge-intensive industries, suggesting that firms locate in large cities to benefit from knowledge spillovers. We also find that localization effects are high in industries that employ workers whose skills are more industry-specific, suggesting that industries locate in specialized economic environments to share a common pool of specialized workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Regional differences in real wages have been shown to be both large and persistent in the United States and the U.K., as well as in the economies of other countries. Empirical evidence suggests that wage differentials adjusted for the cost of living cannot only be explained by the unequal spatial distribution of characteristics determining earnings. Rather, average wage gap decomposition reveals the important contribution made by regional heterogeneity in the price assigned to these characteristics. This paper proposes a method for assessing regional disparities in the entire wage distribution and for decomposing the effect of differences across regions in the endowments and prices of the characteristics. The hypothesis forwarded is that the results from previous studies obtained by comparing average regional wages may be partial and nonrobust. Empirical evidence from a matched employer-employee dataset for Spain confirms marked differences in wage distributions between regions, which do not result from worker and firm characteristics but from the increasing role of regional differences in the return to human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The 2008 financial and economic crisis has led to widespread destruction of employment in Spain. Using municipality data, I examine employment growth differences between urban cores, urban hinterlands, and rural areas during the pre‐crisis period and the recession period. The data show that patterns of growth and decline have been very uneven across different types of areas. While in the boom years, hinterlands and rural areas experienced higher growth, urban core areas have done better during the recession years. I then test three strands of explanations for local growth differences: (i) the role of the local sectoral composition, (ii) the role of human capital, and (iii) the role of access to urban core areas. Estimations for employment growth in the two periods show that the crisis has altered some of the drivers of local employment growth and that human capital has been a key determinant of local resilience during the Great Recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether access to markets had a significant influence on migration choices of Spanish internal migrants in the interwar years. In it we perform a structural contrast of a New Economic Geography model that focuses on the forward linkage that links workers location choice with the geography of industrial production. The results prove the existence of a direct relation between workers' localization decisions and the market potential of the host regions. This could help to explain the apparently low intensity of internal migrations in Spain until the 1920s as well as its geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the effect of infrastructure on the cost and productivity performance of the private productive sector of Spanish regions over the period 1980–1993. We use a dual approach based on cost functions that allows us to recover the usual parameters estimated with production functions. In addition, we obtain rates of return and cost elasticities of production factors at the regional level. Our framework explicitly considers that some factors are quasi-fixed and their volume can differ from their optimal endowment levels. Our results indicate that the public sector has contributed significantly to enhance productivity and reduce costs in the private sector of almost every Spanish region. Nevertheless, there is still scope for the government to continue its investment efforts, given that there remains an appreciable gap between observed and optimal public capital, and we find that in the long run, public capital promotes private investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy makers often try to raise a region's income by altering its industrial mix. However, such attempts to increase local income may have an adverse effect on the stability of the region's economy. In this paper, we develop single-, aggregate-, and multiregional portfolio models that can be used by policy makers to generate frontiers of risk/income-efficient industrial mixtures for a regional economy. These portfolio models are modified for application to the tourist industry in six regions of Spain. In practice, we find that the introduction of bounds on the magnitude of sector rebalancing has a major effect on the model solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting limits on government action is critical to economic development. Some forms of government organization, such as market‐preserving federalism, seem effective to protect property rights in the long term with good results for economic efficiency. Spain endowed its regions with "Statutes of Autonomy" in the 1980s thus moving from a centralized to a decentralized form of government. It renewed and expanded some of the statutes in the 2000s. This article investigates whether these two waves of regionalization, which had their own characteristics in each region, had led to positive effects on economic performance. Using a novel autonomous region/country‐matched balanced sample for the period 1950–2016, we apply the synthetic control method and compare the economic growth trajectories of Spanish regions with their synthetic control groups not affected by the regionalization process. We show that the first wave of "Statutes of Autonomy" had a positive but temporary economic growth impact. By contrast, the second wave of regionalization of the 2000s is associated with a negative growth impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the relevance and nature of shifts in relative prices at the regional level in Spain. Deviations in relative prices tend to be small (at most half a point of inflation annually) but persistent. They are determined by features intrinsic to deep economic integration, in particular, wage mechanisms operating at the national level. This is in stark contrast to evidence at the international level. Therefore, while acknowledging that divergent price evolutions are possible in the European Monetary Union, their nature will be different from those observed among Spanish regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the "determinants" of spatial variations in youth unemployment and NEET rates, and the presence of spatial clusters, for Italy, Spain and the UK. We aggregate Labour Force Survey data for the period 1993–2018 to a "regional" level. We find that youths are sensitive to aggregate labor market conditions and a discouraged worker effect. In the UK and Spain, temporary jobs are more likely to be preferred to part‐time jobs, whereas in Italy the opposite occurs. There is evidence of spatial clustering of youth unemployment and NEET rates. We discuss the implications for place‐based regional and labor market policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines wage differences across Spain's NUTS‐2 regions along the entire wage distribution based on matched employer‐employee microdata from 2006 to 2014. Unlike previous related studies, we properly control for differences in regional purchasing power parities, which are very large in practice. Although part of the raw regional wage differences observed is explained by differences between regions in productive structures, and, to a much lesser extent, in labor forces, noteworthy, very similar throughout the wage distribution regional differences net of composition effects arise even after controlling for a broad set of individual and firm characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using a nationally representative sample of 12,344 immigrants from 41 different countries of ancestry living in Spain in 2007, we find that the higher the housing‐loan penetration in the country of ancestry, the higher the likelihood of having a mortgage in Spain. Similarly, the higher the mortgage depth in the country of ancestry, the higher the present value of the monthly mortgage payments. Our results suggest that social norms regarding mortgage finance in the country of ancestry matter in determining immigrants’ mortgage finance in the host country. More specifically, the effect of social norms on the decision to have a mortgage (the extensive margin) and the amount of the mortgage payments (the intensive margin) is about one third and tenth the size of the effect of having a college degree on mortgage debt, respectively. Evidence of strong persistence of culture among those with longer tenure in the host country, those who immigrated as children or young adults, and second‐generation immigrants suggests that vertical transmission of beliefs (from parents to children) is a plausible channel of transmission. Perhaps most importantly, we find that cultural attitudes regarding property rights are most relevant when explaining individuals’ decision to get a mortgage, but those regarding credit information matter most when explaining the amount of the mortgage debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT We provide causal estimates of the effect of immigration on house prices and construction activity in Spain over the period 2000-2010. During this period Spain experienced spectacular swings in both immigration and the housing market. Our instrumental-variables estimates suggest that between 2000 and 2010, immigration led to an average 1.5 percent annual increase in the working-age population. This was responsible for an annual increase in housing prices of about 2 percent, and for a 1.2-1.5 percent increase in housing units. Overall, immigration was responsible for one quarter of the increase in prices and about half of the construction activity over the decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the economic determinants of interregional labor force flows in Spain. Role of the flow of workers from one region to another in solving regional structural imbalances in the labor market; Impact of unemployment on out-migration; Significance of the rate change of relative wages on migration.