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In the last few years, the proliferation of digital labour platforms has led to the transformation of business models and labour relations in an increasing number of economic activities, including highly feminized and informal traditional sectors, such as care and domestic work. Drawing on an analysis of 37 digital care platforms in Spain, this research compares the distinctive features and structural power dynamics they engender, and it constructs a taxonomy of business models of these care platforms. By analysing the main features of their operational models, we are capable of distinguishing three main types of platforms: marketplace, on‐demand, and digital placement agencies. First, the paper argues that the distinctive features of each digital platform business model have differentiated impacts on working conditions in terms of access to tasks, remuneration, flexibility and means of control. This differentiation allows us to understand what is transformative and what is continuous in platforms' precarization or formalisation of care work and working conditions of carers, mainly women and migrants. Each business model has its differentiated outcomes in terms of labour control and reorganization of women's and migrants' reproductive work. Second, more broadly, while digital care platforms may have contributed to facilitating workers' access to jobs, reducing transaction costs and standardising processes, this has often been through the creation of more flexible and insecure forms of work and to increased market pressures. Therefore, this study contributes to existing research addressing the degree of formalization of labour relations in digital platform work through a nuanced analysis of their business models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of real decision-making incentives remains under debate after decades of economic experiments. In time preferences experiments involving future payments, real incentives are particularly problematic due to between-options differences in transaction costs, among other issues. What if hypothetical payments provide accurate data which, moreover, avoid transaction cost problems? In this paper, we test whether the use of hypothetical or one-out-of-ten-participants probabilistic—versus real—payments affects the elicitation of short-term and long-term discounting in a standard multiple price list task. We analyze data from a lab experiment in Spain and well-powered field and online experiments in Nigeria and the UK, respectively (N = 2,038). Our results indicate that the preferences elicited using the three payment methods are mostly the same: we can reject that either hypothetical or one-out-of-ten payments change any of the four preference measures considered by more than 0.18 SD with respect to real payments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study, employing survey research design, analyzes the role of Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) in the processes of digital transformation and technological changes of publishing companies in Spain. The overall objective of this study is to gauge the scope and depth of the impact of KIBS on Spanish publishers; specifically to identify the drivers of this collaboration through the Transaction Costs Theory; and to determine the degree of support in their transition to new business models. An online survey was administered to the 992 publishers belonging to DILVE, the Internet-based platform that facilitates the management and distribution of bibliographic data, and marketing information of books published in Spain. A total of 310 publishing companies responded to the survey questionnaire, giving a response rate of 31.3 percent. Findings suggested that KIBS are not seen as a threat - neither in the evolution and progress of the publishing sector nor in its digital transformation, modernization, and competitive improvement - but as an opportunity instead as KIBS allow accessing all those innovations that, otherwise, would be difficult for Spanish publishers to achieve in isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Performance assessments quantify either abatement (AC) or transaction costs (TC). • We develop tools to quantify both AC and TC. • Socio-hydrology modeling of interconnected human and water systems is used to measure AC. • We develop a cutting-edge longitudinal dataset to assess future directions and magnitude of TC. • Results in the Douro Basin (Spain) show TC can represent 5.7 % − 8.3 % of total costs (AC + TC). • This highlights the need to account for AC and TC in performance assessments. Water reallocations have costs to the users of water, or abatement costs (e.g., charges designed to marginally increase environmental water flows), but also nontrivial institutional transaction costs (e.g., costs incurred to develop institutions and organizations to support and enforce environmental reallocations). However, institutional transaction costs studies are very limited and those available do not integrate abatement costs measurements, which constrains our ability to assess the performance of water reallocation. This paper presents the first integrated analysis of abatement and transaction costs of water reallocation. The analysis is illustrated with an application to the Douro River Basin, an agricultural basin in central Spain that has recently finished its second planning cycle (2015–2021). First, we use a hydroeconomic model that accounts for the two-way feedback responses between human and water systems to estimate the abatement costs of water reallocations, as well as their effectiveness in achieving the good ecological status of water bodies. Second, we measure and monetize realized institutional transaction costs of river basin planning over time and build on this cutting-edge longitudinal dataset to assess future directions and magnitude of transaction costs. We use this information to assess and rank the performance (through cost-effectiveness) of the water reallocations considered in the latest Douro River Basin Plan under alternative climate change scenarios. We find that under the hypothesis of stationary transaction costs, these can represent between 5.7% and 8.3% of the total reallocation costs (abatement plus transaction costs). This non-trivial magnitude highlights the need to account for both abatement and transaction costs when assessing the performance of water reallocations, and environmental policy overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Government policy shall address the strategic nature of local resource use decisions. • Local resource users face linked coordination, prisoner's dilemma, and zero-sum/externality situations. • Governments shape the behavior of local resource users via bundles of policy instruments. • Policy instruments contribute to local collective action via a handful of mechanisms. This paper presents a diagnostic approach to the role and capacity of governments to facilitate local collective action and alleviate environmental problems. The paper adds to a nascent scholarship aiming to conciliate theories on "governance by government" and "governance by self-organization". We adopt two premises for that purpose: (1) policy instruments shall be tailored to the strategic nature of local resource management decisions; and (2) such nature is not static and can be modified via governmental policies. We first build on the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to characterize the decision-making situations that local resource users face and the local rules that shape said situations. Then, based on common pool resource (CPR) and policy instrument choice theory, we identify four mechanisms through which different policy instruments can facilitate local collective action (change in payoffs and their perception, reduction of transaction costs, reduction of uncertainty, and normative consonance). This analytical approach is then applied to four illustrative cases of water management in Germany, France, Greece and Spain. As shown, local resource users are embedded in not one but many overlapping decision-making situations. In this context, the promotion of collective action is rarely accomplished via a single policy instrument or mechanism but via bundles of them. Also, the paper illustrates the importance of understanding how governmental policies modify the structure of rules and incentives that affect local resource users, potentially facilitating local collective action and the solution of environmental problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a relatively unknown market for partial control or corporate influence in Spanish listed firms, where the control transaction size is below the legal threshold that triggers a mandatory tender offer, as this kind of deal looks for exercising some degree of control, but not a full control. The goal of this paper is to go further in its empirical analysis by exploring its distinguishing features, using as the criterion to define its transactions obtaining a seat in the board of directors. We find that these deals are mainly located in the segment of the market of large trades where the rules for private negotiations are easier to implement; the size of the block is relatively large and it is negotiated as a whole block. Besides, the most common buyer has no previous stake in the firm. We find no evidence that the buyers pay, in median, for a seat on the board of directors, but the variability of the premiums for those blocks is higher and shows that buyers that had no control position in the target firm pay more for being among largest shareholders (partial control) and less for not being among them (influence). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disposal of desalination brine, which contains a higher concentration of salts, is treated as waste and discharged into the environment. In this brine, several elements, when processing and extraction were possible, could be susceptible to exploitation and valorisation. Among all the ions existing in desalination brine, and whose industrial use is possible, sodium (Na), magnesium (Mg), calcium (Ca) and boron (B) are found at high concentrations; there are also other elements, not as abundant as previous, but highly demanded in the current industry, such as lithium (Li), rubidium (Rb), strontium (Sr) or gallium (Ga). These elements, as well as other alkaline metals, have taken on considerable prominence today due to their technological applications. Analysing the prices and quotations of these elements in the international markets for raw materials, it is possible to determine the economic potential of this mining activity of desalination plants in Spain. The economic value of the extracted elements also incorporates other additional advantages, which focus on the elimination, or reduction, of brine discharges, the savings in transportation and transaction costs of raw materials, in addition to the considerable reduction in environmental impacts caused by traditional mining. • The value of the elements present in the desalination brine has been obtained. • This value varies depending on the source of desalinated water. • Two types of valuable elements are identified according to price and quantity. • The results are key to design the brine mining strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We estimate the information transaction costs emerging in a water market between irrigators. • We couple a hydrologic model, a mathematical programming model and an ABM. • Results show that transaction costs can reduce the economic surplus up to 45%. The economic literature has extensively researched water markets, finding that this instrument can deliver superior resource allocations under growing scarcity. However, these assessments typically ignore the information, bargaining, and enforcement costs that occur in trades, known as transaction costs, which can be particularly relevant in emerging markets such as those for water. This paper presents a multi-agent cellular automata model that couples a positive multi-attribute utility programming (PMAUP) model with an agent-based model (ABM) to elicit the information transaction costs of water trading under alternative market and climate scenarios. A first experiment evaluates an ideal water market with no transaction costs, which is then compared to alternative decentralized spot market setups representing different degrees of information availability that are modeled using the coupled PMAUP-ABM. The difference between the economic surplus under the ideal market and that achieved under alternative market setups with information constraints is used as a proxy value of information transaction costs. Methods are illustrated with an application to the Douro River Basin in central Spain. Results show that information transaction costs can reduce the economic surplus between 0.6% and 45% depending on the scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law 46/1999 incorporated formal water markets into the Spanish legal and regulatory framework, allowing spot water markets and the creation of water banks. The implementation of water markets in Spain aimed at improving the efficiency of water use by reallocating water towards uses with higher added value. However, the performance of water markets in Spain has been rather disappointing, since they have been operative only during drought periods, and even under these extreme scarcity situations, trading activity counted for less than 5.0% of total water use. The narrowness of the market suggests that there are some barriers hampering their effective functioning. This paper examines the evolution and performance of water markets in Spain, relying on a transaction costs analysis framework. This analysis allows the identification of the main factors impeding water markets from operating effectively as a water reallocation tool. This analysis also provides some guidelines on how to overcome these obstacles and, thus, how to improve the efficiency of water use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian & Latin American Economic History is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Intermunicipal cooperation is being increasingly adopted in various countries as a part of local service delivery reforms. This article draws on survey data from Spain's municipalities to examine the reasons underpinning the decisions of local governments to engage in intermunicipal cooperation and privatisation. Our empirical analysis indicates that small municipalities prefer to rely on cooperation for reducing costs, while their larger counterparts prefer to privatise the delivery of services. By cooperating, scale economies can be achieved with lower transaction costs and fewer concerns for competition than is the case via private production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The new Spanish Act 54/2007, dated December 28th 2007, on international adoption has introduced a completely new set of Conflict of Laws rules regarding the constitution of international adoptions by Spanish Courts. Those Conflict of Laws rules rely on the application of the Law of the State whose society is affected by the adoption. This is also the State in whose society the person who is adopted is going to live in permanently. That way, transaction costs connected with the determination of the applicable Law to international adoptions decrease. Therefore, individuals are favoured, and favor minoris is protected by enhancing the constitution of adoptions in an international context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the transition process in Spanish economic policy throughout the period 1975-1991, from a new institutional economics approach and a Transaction Cost Politics perspective that point out the relationships among institutions, polity and economy. During these years, the political mutation of the Spanish State and the path of the Spanish economy impelled a process of institutional change that triggered the birth of a modern economic policy, and became a key explicative variable for understanding the Spanish economic change. This was clear for fiscal, monetary and financial policies, whose complete reorientation appears as a direct result of the reconstruction of the system of political rules. The Spanish case is a source of knowledge for developing economies and countries in transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ager: Journal of Depopulation & Rural Development Studies / Revista de Estudios sobre Despoblación y Desarrollo Rural is the property of Rolde de Estudios Aragoneses and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

I analyze implicit transaction costs of trading government debt securities on the Spanish stock exchanges (SE) electronic trading system. The SE’s multilateral system is used mainly as an outlet for retail investors to liquidate Treasury accounts positions before maturity. I compare identical Treasury security trades on the same day in two different markets: the SE and the interdealer market. By analyzing these yield spreads I learn more about the behavior of the markdowns included in the retail prices from the institutional prices. I find evidence that these yield premia depend on traditional features to explain wholesale market liquidity premia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines changes in the organization of the Spanish cotton industry from 1736 to 1860 in its core region of Catalonia. As the Spanish cotton industry adopted the most modern technology available and experienced the transition to the factory system, cotton spinning and weaving mills became increasingly vertically integrated. Asset specificity, more than other factors, explains this tendency towards vertical integration. The probability of a firm being vertically integrated was higher among firms located in districts with high concentration ratios, and rose with size and the use of modern machinery. At the same time, subcontracting predominated in other phases of production and distribution, where transaction costs appear to be less important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues and provides evidence that the stock of immigrants in a country has a positive effect on the share of its bilateral intra-industry trade (IIT). The paper links the literatures about immigration and trade and about IIT determinants. The key is that immigration contributes to trade transaction costs reduction and this would benefit the trade in differentiated products, i.e. IIT, more than the trade in homogeneous products, i.e. inter-industry trade. We test this hypothesis using Spanish data and departing from the models developed by Helpman. Results are robust to different IIT measures, estimation methods and specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance of several alternative forecasts for the Ibex-35 index options market data is compared and a test for market efficiency of the Spanish Option Market with respect to volatility forecasts provided. The forecasts include time series, implied volatilities and composite specifications using both parametric and nonparametric ways. It is found that the choice of the best model depends on the error measurement that depends on the ultimate purpose of the forecasting procedure. Also the results generated from an ex ante arbitrage strategy are not different from zero at conventional significance levels once the transaction costs are taken into account. This result supports the hypothesis of the market efficiency of the Spanish Option Market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Farmland abandonment is common in the southern EU countries. This complex phenomenon has a set of interlinked causes and consequences, among the latter the undermining of farmers' cooperatives role as supply aggregators. The paper discusses a multi-actor farmland consolidation model that avoids some of the drawbacks identified by literature to some models of land mobilization, mostly transaction and agency costs. This model consists on a local-based strategy of common land management, led by a cooperative and supported by a set of external agents. As empirical evidences, we show the attitudes of cooperatives' managers surveyed towards common land management and present a case study implementing this multi-actor model. This piece of evidence shows that strengthening social capital is crucial to the success of these social innovation experiences. • Besides other consequences, land abandonment is eroding cooperatives' role. • Cooperatives in the Mediterranean region are starting to manage abandoned land. • Multi-actor arrangements can mobilize land avoiding transaction and agency costs. • Empirical evidences show that there is wide potential for these arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economía de la Empresa (Business Economics) emerged in Spain as a distinct academic discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. In its early years, Business Economics shared common influences with Accounting, particularly ideas and theories acquired from the translation of Italian and German works on Economia Aziendale and Betriebswirtschaftslehre. However, partly because of the institutional structure of Spanish universities, the two disciplines moved apart. During the Franco regime, Spanish accounting research was quite isolated, and with the return of democracy and the move towards greater European involvement much research was devoted to issues of financial accounting harmonization and standardization. This normative research was of little interest to Business Economics researchers, who were developing analytical approaches grounded in economic theory. More recently, academics working in the two disciplines have drawn on a wider range of theoretical approaches, from empirical studies to behavioural and organizational theory and institutional economics based on agency theory and transaction cost analysis. At present, the disciplines 'walk separately down the same road', but the new generation of researchers has the opportunity to bring Accounting and Business Economics closer together from an intellectual and scientific point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change represents a serious threat to life in earth. Agriculture releases significant emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), but also offers low-cost opportunities to mitigate GHG emissions. This paper assesses agricultural GHG emissions in Aragon, one important and representative region for agriculture in Spain. The Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC) approach is used to analyze the abatement potential and cost-efficiency of mitigation measures under several scenarios, with and without taking into account the interaction among measures and their transaction costs. The assessment identifies the environmental and economic outcomes of different combinations of measures, including crop, livestock and forest measures. Some of these measures are win-win, with pollution abatement at negative costs to farmers. Moreover, we develop future mitigation scenarios for agriculture toward the year 2050. Results highlight the trade-offs and synergies between the economic and environmental outcomes of mitigation measures. The biophysical processes underlying mitigation efforts are assessed taking into account the significant effects of interactions between measures. Interactions reduce the abatement potential and worsen the cost-efficiency of measures. The inclusion of transaction costs provides a better ranking of measures and a more accurate estimation of implementation costs. The scenario analysis shows how the combinations of measures could reduce emissions by up to 75% and promote sustainable agriculture in the future.

A hedonic approach is used to study farmland prices in Aragon (Spain). Data over 450 transactions in 33 shires, in 2001 and 2002 are analysed. The marginal values for irrigated vs. non-irrigated land, the productive orientation and the differentiation of production through a Designation of Origin (D.O.) are used as explanatory variables. Socio-economic variables are also included. A Box-Cox transformation is specified to get the most appropriate functional form. The results indicate that water availability, the crop orientation, and the eligibility within a D.O. are the key factors affecting farmland prices, while the social environment and infrastructure has a minor impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]