Human Capital Spillovers Productivity and Regional Convergence in Spain

This paper analyses the differential impact of human capital, in terms of different levels of schooling, on regional productivity and convergence. The potential existence of geographical spillovers of human capital is also considered by applying spatial panel data techniques. The empirical analysis of Spanish provinces between 1980 and 2007 confirms the positive impact of human capital on regional productivity and convergence, but reveals no evidence of any positive geographical spillovers of human capital. In fact, in some specifications the spatial lag presented by tertiary studies has a negative effect on the variables under consideration.

Audit firm tenure and qualified opinions: New evidence from Spain

The 2010 Green Paper on Audit Policy by the European Commission has explicitly questioned the sufficiency of audit rotation rules established by European Union Members to guarantee auditor independence. In addition, the Paper clearly states that more research is needed regarding the effects of long audit tenures on independence. In this article, we have replicated the research by Ruiz-Barbadillo, Gómez-Aguilar, and Biedma (2005) about the effects of audit firm tenure on independence with more updated data. However, unlike them, we have performed panel data estimations instead of pooled regression. Our approach allows for a better control of individual unobserved heterogeneity, thus reducing potential problems caused by omitted variable bias. While Ruiz-Barbadillo et al. reported an unexpected positive effect of tenure on the likelihood of audit qualifications, we do not show any significant effect of tenure on the opinion of the audit report. Our results are robust to various sensitivity analyses.

A Comparative Study of Desktop, Fishtank, and Cave Systems for the Exploration of Volume Rendered Confocal Data Sets

We present a participant study that compares biological data exploration tasks using volume renderings of laser confocal microscopy data across three environments that vary in level of immersion: a desktop, fishtank, and cave system. For the tasks, data, and visualization approach used in our study, we found that subjects qualitatively preferred and quantitatively performed better in the cave compared with the fishtank and desktop. Subjects performed real-world biological data analysis tasks that emphasized understanding spatial relationships including characterizing the general features in a volume, identifying colocated features, and reporting geometric relationships such as whether clusters of cells were coplanar. After analyzing data in each environment, subjects were asked to choose which environment they wanted to analyze additional data sets in - subjects uniformly selected the cave environment.

The impact of FTAs on MENA trade in agricultural and industrial products

This paper analyses the impact of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) on Middle East and North African Countries (MENA) trade for the period 1994-2010. The analysis distinguishes between industrial and agricultural trade to take into account the different liberalisation schedules. An augmented gravity model is estimated using up-to-date panel data techniques to control for all time-invariant bilateral factors that influence bilateral trade as well as for the so-called multilateral resistance factors. We also control for the endogeneity of the agreements and test for self-selection bias due to the presence of zero trade in our sample. The main findings indicate that North-South-FTAs and South-South- FTAs have a differential impact in terms of increasing trade in MENA countries, with the former being more beneficial in terms of exports for MENA countries, but both showing greater global market integration. We also find that FTAs that include agricultural products, in which MENA countries have a clear comparative advantage, have more favourable effects for these countries than those only including industrial products. JEL code: F10, F15

Productivity, Technical eficiency and internationalisation of the Spanish chemical sector

relationship between productivity and international position of Spanish chemical firms in the period 2005-2011. The goal is to determine whether companies that follow and international strategy, either with exports or by investment in foreign countries obtain greater productivity growth than these that do not operate in global market. For this purpose a panel data set with microdata has been created. A preliminary analysis of the evolution of productivity growth in the sector is carried out. The measurement of Total Factor Productivity is performed. With the estimated TFP we analyze the differentials in productivity growth, comparing the effects of export and investment behavior with non-international firms.