La Representación del movimiento social anti-desahucios en la prensa española : una perspectva de agenda-setting

Aunque hasta este momento se abundan estudios acerca de los movimientos sociales, la mayoría se aborda desde los propios movimientos y investigar los movimientos que se desarrollan y alcanzan una magnitud increíble mediante las redes sociales ocupa una posición imprescindible en este tipo de la investigación, mientras que realizar un estudio sobre los movimientos sociales a través de los medios tradicionales y oficiales carece de atención de los investigadores. Por esta razón, tomo el caso del movimiento antidesahucios como un ejemplo clàsico para examinar los movimientos sociales desde la perspectiva mediàtica, es decir, la perspectiva de agenda-setting

Standardized enforcement: Access to justice vs contractual innovation

We model the different ways in which precedents and contract standardization shapethe development of markets and the law. In a setup where more resourceful parties candistort contract enforcement to their advantage, we find that the introduction of astandard contract reduces enforcement distortions relative to precedents, exerting twoeffects: i) it statically expands the volume of trade, but ii) it crowds out the use ofinnovative contracts, hindering contractual innovation. We shed light on the largescale commercial codification occurred in the 19th century in many countries (evenCommon Law ones) during a period of booming commerce and long distance trade.

A foundation for strategic agenda voting

We offer complete characterizations of the equilibrium outcomesof two prominent agenda voting institutions that are widely used in the democraticworld: the amendment, also known as the Anglo-American procedure,and the successive, or equivalently the Euro-Latin procedure. Our axiomaticapproach provides a proper understanding of these voting institutions, and allowscomparisons between them, and with other voting procedures.

Spinning welfare: The gains from process innovation in cotton and car production

Economists and economic historians want to know how much better life is today than in the past.Fifty years ago economic historians found surprisingly small gains from 19th century US railroads,while more recently economists have found relatively large gains from electricity, computers and cellphones. In each case the implicit or explicit assumption is that researchers were measuring the valueof a new good to society. In this paper we use the same techniques to find the value to society ofmaking existing goods cheaper. Henry Ford did not invent the car, and the inventors of mechanisedcotton spinning in the industrial revolution invented no new product. But both made existing productsdramatically cheaper, bringing them into the reach of many more consumers. That in turn haspotentially large welfare effects. We find that the consumer surplus of Henry Ford s production linewas around 2% by 1923, 15 years after Ford began to implement the moving assembly line, while themechanisation of cotton spinning was worth around 6% by 1820, 34 years after its initial invention.Both are large: of the same order of magnitude as consumer expenditure on these items, and as largeor larger than the value of the internet to consumers. On the social savings measure traditionally usedby economic historians, these process innovations were worth 15% and 18% respectively, makingthem more important than railroads. Our results remind us that process innovations can be at least asimportant for welfare and productivity as the invention of new products.

Competing engines of growth: Innovation and standardization

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model where innovation takes theform of the introduction of new goods whose production requires skilled workers.Innovation is followed by a costly process of standardization, whereby these newgoods are adapted to be produced using unskilled labor. Our framework highlightsa number of novel results. First, standardization is both an engine of growth anda potential barrier to it. As a result, growth is an inverse U-shaped function ofthe standardization rate (and of competition). Second, we characterize the growthand welfare maximizing speed of standardization. We show how optimal protection of intellectual property rights affecting the cost of standardization vary withthe skill-endowment, the elasticity of substitution between goods and other parameters. Third, we show that, depending on how competition between innovatingand standardizing firms is modelled and on parameter values, a new type of multiplicity of equilibria may arise. Finally, we study the implications of our model forthe skill-premium and we illustrate novel reasons for linking North-South trade tointellectual property rights protection.

An agenda-setting model of electoral competition

This paper presents a model of electoral competition focusing on the formation of thepublic agenda. An incumbent government and a challenger party in opposition competein elections by choosing the issues that will key out their campaigns. Giving salience toan issue implies proposing an innovative policy proposal, alternative to the status-quo.Parties trade off the issues with high salience in voters concerns and those with broadagreement on some alternative policy proposal. Each party expects a higher probabilityof victory if the issue it chooses becomes salient in the voters decision. But remarkably,the issues which are considered the most important ones by a majority of votes may notbe given salience during the electoral campaign. An incumbent government may survivein spite of its bad policy performance if there is no sufficiently broad agreement on apolicy alternative. We illustrate the analytical potential of the model with the case of theUnited States presidential election in 2004.

Competition, innovation and growth with limited commitment

We study how barriers to business start-up affect the investment in knowledge capital when contracts are not enforceable. Barriers to business start-up lower the competition for knowledge capital and, in absence of commitment, reduce the incentive to accumulate knowledge. As a result, countries with large barriers experience lower income and growth. Our results are consistent with cross-country evidence showing that the cost of business start-up is negatively correlated with the level and growth of income.

The effects of uncertainty avoidance on brand performance: Marketing creativity, product innovation and the brand duration

This paper investigates the link between brand performance and cultural primes in high-risk,innovation-based sectors. In theory section, we propose that the level of cultural uncertaintyavoidance embedded in a firm determine its marketing creativity by increasing the complexityand the broadness of a brand. It determines also the rate of firm product innovations.Marketing creativity and product innovation influence finally the firm marketingperformance. Empirically, we study trademarked promotion in the Software Security Industry(SSI). Our sample consists of 87 firms that are active in SSI from 11 countries in the period1993-2000. We use the data coming from SSI-related trademarks registered by these firms,ending up with 2,911 SSI-related trademarks and a panel of 18,213 observations. We estimatea two stage model in which first we predict the complexity and the broadness of a trademarkas a measure of marketing creativity and the rate of product innovations. Among severalcontrol variables, our variable of theoretical interest is the Hofstede s uncertainty avoidancecultural index. Then, we estimate the trademark duration with a hazard model using thepredicted complexity and broadness as well as the rate of product innovations, along with thesame control variables. Our evidence confirms that the cultural avoidance affects the durationof the trademarks through the firm marketing creativity and product innovation.

Horizontal innovation in the theory of growth and development

We analyze recent contributions to growth theory based on the model of expanding variety of Romer (1990). In the first part, we present different versions of the benchmark linear model with imperfect competition. These include the labequipment model, labor-for-intermediates and directed technical change . We review applications of the expanding variety framework to the analysis of international technology diffusion, trade, cross-country productivity differences, financial development and fluctuations. In many such applications, a key role is played by complementarities in the process of innovation.

The case for a new accounting research agenda in Spain

In Spain both accounting practice and accounting research have been strongly influenced by accounting practices developed in the Englishspeaking world. This paper:1) Summarizes a seminal English paper, the 'Corporate Report', that identified the potential for accounting reports to serve a wide range of users.2) Identifies the ways in which English language accounting conceptual frameworks have paid lip service to a range of user needs, but in practice have excluded users other than investors and creditors.3) Argues that for Spain the ideas put forward in the Corporate Report have a particular relevance, and might usefully form the basis for a new research agenda.

Drug innovation, prices and health

This article tries to reconcile economic-industrial policy with health policy when dealing with biomedical innovation and welfare state sustainability. Better health accounts for an increasingly large proportion of welfare improvements. Explanation is given to the welfare losses coming from the fact than industrial and health policy tend to ignore each other. Drug s prices reflecting their relative relative effectiveness send the right signal to the industry rewarding innovation with impact on quantity and quality of life- and to the buyers of health care services.The level of drug s public reimbursement indicates the social willingness to pay of the different national health systems, not only by means of inclusion, or rejection, in the basket of services covered, but especially establishing the proportion of the price that is going to be financed publicly.Reference pricing for therapeutic equivalents as the upper limit of the social willingness to pay- and two-tiered co-payments for users (avoidable and inversely related with the incremental effectiveness of de drug) are deemed appropriate for those countries concerned at the same time with increasing their productivity and maintaining its welfare state. Profits drive R&D but not its location. There is no intrinsic contradiction between high productivity and a consolidated National Health Service (welfare state) as the European Nordic Countries are telling us every day.

Lobbying, innovation and protectionist cycles

This paper explains why trade liberalizations occur in developing countries,and why they are often reversed. It does so by focusing on the use oflobbying for protection by import competing firms as a means to postponecostly product quality upgrades to keep up with foreign competitors. Giventhe availability of a political market for import tariffs, domestic firmswill lobby for a sequence of tariffs that insulate domestic profits from awidening quality gap, thereby allowing adjustment to be postponed. But asthe contributions required by the government grow with the size of thequality gap, it will be optimal to adjust quality and to decrease thelobbying effort at some time, leading to liberalization and technologicalcatch-up. But then the equilibrium tariff will again be small and "cheap",and it will pay to start lobbying anew, until the next quality adjustment.Therefore, cycles in protection will occur as a result of the use oflobbying as a substitute for innovation. The model thus sheds new light onthe impact of the costs of protection on the effectiveness of the lobbyingeffort over time, and on their implications for the timing and the timehorizon of trade reforms in developing countries.

Entrepreneurial risk, investment and innovation

In this paper I develop a general equilibrium model with risk averse entrepreneurialfirms and with public firms. The model predicts that an increase in uncertainty reducesthe propensity of entrepreneurial firms to innovate, while it does not affect thepropensity of public firms to innovate. Furthermore, it predicts that the negativeeffect of uncertainty on innovation is stronger for the less diversified entrepreneurialfirms, and is stronger in the absence of financing frictions in the economy. In thesecond part of the paper I test these predictions on a dataset of small and mediumItalian manufacturing firms.