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Modelling and testing whether competitive pressures driven by deregulatory changes make markets more competitive are examined. Departures from competitive markets are modelled via mark-up prices. Empirically, a panel data is used on Spanish savings banking industry that is undergoing unprecedented changes caused by the deregulation of financial services, the establishment of the economic and monetary union and developments in information technology. Evidence of mark-ups in output markets is found, and such mark-ups are found to decline slowly over time. This finding suggests that the presence of deregulatory pressures improved the competitive strength of the Spanish savings banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the transformation of television serial fiction in Spain from deregulation and the early stages of private television to the dawn of the digital era (1990–2010). The adaptation of Latin-American telenovelas and English-speaking soap operas to the local context brought traditional Spanish costumbrismo in television fiction up to date. Using this as a starting point, the study identifies four stages of the long-running serial format in Spain that demonstrate its capacity to adapt to a double logic of transnationalization maintaining proximity to regional markets alongside a process of gradual adjustment to the changing social, cultural and economic context. The consolidation of democracy in Spain and successive Socialist administrations (1982–1990) favoured the renewal of themes from classical melodrama with the inclusion of issues until then barely addressed, including women's liberation, sexuality and the recovery of historical memory: topics that have become the mainstay of Spanish television serial fiction in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frontier cost efficiency and technical change are examined for separate panels of Spanish commercial and savings banks over 1985 - 91, a period in which interest rates were totally deregulated and geographical restrictions were removed. Deregulation was supposed to provide an opportunity for the Spanish banking industry to become more efficient prior to the removal of competitive barriers between countries within the EEC. Two previous studies have estimated production frontiers for the operating cost component of Spanish savings banks using a non-parametric (DEA) approach, finding a decrease in relative efficiency plus the equivalent of higher frontier costs. Operating cost accounts for only 40% of total cost. By including all costs, financial as well as operating, we determine the total cost efficiency of Spanish commercial and savings banks and their total response to deregulation. Cost efficiency is determined using a thick frontier approach while shifts in the cost frontier are determined using a time trend analysis. Our results suggest that deregulation was associated with a decrease in relative cost efficiency for commercial banks but no change for savings banks. The cost frontier shifted up for both types of institutions over 1985 - 91. Overall, our efficiency results paint a more positive picture regarding the effects of deregulation on the Spanish banking industry than obtained previously, although we still find similar negative effects for technical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion and intensification of banking competition, undergone by the Spanish banking industry during the last 15 years, has allowed commercial banks and savings banks to more freely define their competitive strategies. This paper reports empirical evidence on the similarities and differences in banks' product mixes along with their time evolution. In particular, it attempts to identify the different kinds of firms according to their output mixes and, on this basis, to analyse if the deregulation and increased competition have resulted into the homogenization (convergence) of specializations between firms or groups of firms (clubs). The empirical success is higher when product mix clubs are considered, achieving higher heterogeneity within the banking system as a whole but increased homogeneity within certain clusters of commercial banks and savings banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2008 economic recession, state intervention in the real estate sector has strengthened. This article explains how housing financialization was reignited in Spain following key policy reforms in 2013. We argue that Spanish authorities managed to strategically recreate a finance-friendly environment to attract global investors. They combined financial policies, other deregulatory reforms and neoliberal measures in a coordinated manner we call a policy package. Our analysis provides evidence of the legal and political arrangements at various state levels that effectively facilitated the reanimation of a new cycle of housing financialization which caused rising inflation in prices and distress in tenants' rights. This approach contributes to the understanding of how state-led actions foster a spatial fix to overcome financial crises by granting global speculative funds extraordinary benefits. In addition, we show how this process occurred with poor democratic accountability and was also confronted by various forms of social contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses productivity growth in Spanish retail stores during the period 1995-2004. It is also interested in analysing the influence of regulation/deregulation processes on the efficiency and productivity of the firms. The analysis is carried out from a disaggregated sectoral perspective at the 4-digit NACE code level. The non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis approach is used to compute Malmquist productivity indexes. These are decomposed into efficiency change and technical change. Big differences are found in the productivity growth for each sector. First, six retail sectors experienced positive productivity growth, while six saw productivity growth decrease. Second, most sectors experienced technical progress. Third, some sectors improved their efficiency, while others became less efficient. Fourth, the TFP improvements were almost entirely due to technical progress, and only four sectors improved their efficiency. The findings obtained from the analysis of the deregulation of opening hours show two important facts: (i) the differences in the productivity and the efficiency of the firms between sectors, and (ii) the losses /improvements of efficiency of the firms in relation to the effects of the shop opening hours or the lack of adaptation to the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the growth of the private rental sector over recent years through a comparative analysis of three classic homeowner societies: Ireland, the UK and Spain. The article argues that theories of financialization provide a useful framework for understanding 'generation rent'. In particular, the cyclical nature of credit markets tends to undermine homeownership over the medium term. This contributes to and intensifies the wider set of policy changes associated with neoliberalism. The article also accounts for the divergent experiences of our three case study countries within their common trajectory. It does so through an analytical focus on the interaction between global aspects of financialization and more nationally based ones, such as mortgage markets, as well as on how both are mediated by national policy regimes. The article thus aims to contribute to the emerging literature seeking to explain 'generation rent' and explore its significance, and more broadly to political economy approaches to housing system change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on qualitative research, focuses on socioeconomic integration trajectories of the refugee population in Spain. In the period between 2014 and 2020, refugees' arrivals in Spain have continuously increased. Despite protection provided by the Spanish Reception System, refugees emulate the same precarious integration outcomes as refugees in other developed countries, such as unemployment, underemployment, poor and unstable housing, low incomes and economic uncertainty, gender inequalities, etc. We believe that a holistic analysis of integration outcomes, overcoming traditional human-capital theories, must include other social and structural factors -economic and institutional frameworks, gender, and ethnic discrimination- that shape their settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 15-M mobilizations shook Spanish society and placed the demand for 'real democracy' at the center of political debate. In order to better understand the scope and impact of the Indignados' democratizing endeavors, this article aims to address an issue that has not received much attention: the connection of this protest cycle with the political economy. To this end, both the opportunity structure generated by the economic crisis and the class and generational conflicts shaping the mobilizations are analyzed. The article proposes that the symbolic and short-term success of 15-M in re-politicizing distributive conflicts contrasts with its medium-term inability to materially democratize the political economy. This relative failure can be explained by the confluence of several factors: on the one hand, 15-M's organizational weakness and its disconnection from a somewhat declining labor movement; on the other, the lack of responsiveness of Spain's political institutions to street politics and the powerful structural inertia of economic dynamics created by decades of neoliberalism. The findings of this case study aim to contribute to scholarly debates on the impacts of social movements and their connection to political economy and social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses 15-M and anti-austerity mobilizations in Spain from the perspective of repression and penalization. The literature has paid a great deal of attention to the consequences of this cycle of protest in relation to the quality of democratic participation and governance; it could be argued that the 15-M movement has raised the standards for key aspects of Spanish democracy. In articulating new counter-hegemonic claims, however, 15-M mobilizations have created an opportunity for new forms of repression. Drawing on criminology, socio-legal studies, and mobilization literature, we argue that this cycle of protest has been penalized. This involves a combination of technologies of repression that include invasive policing, securitization, and criminalization. Penalization needs to be seen as a dissent-suppressing mechanism, a negative response by political authorities and private actors that thrives when societies suffer from widespread anxieties about insecurity and crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work identifies the urban impacts of two FIFA World Cups organised before the consolidation of the urban entrepreneurialism model, Spain 1982 and Italy 1990, and compares them with those of more recent sports mega-events. Main differences mostly concern the impacts related to the material transformation of hosting cities, with more recent events mostly affected. At the same time, most of the outcomes related to the urban politics sphere seem not to be much dependent on the type of governance model, whether it is influenced by entrepreneurial urbanism or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deploys the notion of 'employable femininity', by which we refer to the mystification along postfeminist lines of an idealized womanhood suitable to be employed and worked upon, in order to explore how women's relation to employment is currently being articulated and contested in contemporary Spain. Structural transformations during neoliberalism have promoted women's rising involvement into labor markets while, simultaneously, reinforcing the systemic relevance of women's unpaid work in the domestic arena. A hegemonic, media-constructed model of femininity has thus emerged where participation into paid employment is presented as a path towards liberation and economic independence for certain women who, nonetheless, cannot do away with the care-related responsibilities traditionally allotted to them. The current Spanish conjuncture provides a paradigmatic case in point to observe how women's relation to employment is being reconfigured, insofar as attempts to 're-domesticate' women in the aftermath of the Great Recession have been confronted by a resurgent feminist movement which, nowadays, figures as the main vector of social contention in contemporary Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weather conditions are important determinants of tourism demand. After reviewing the main contributions of previous research on the role of climatic variables in tourism demand functions, we explore different modelling alternatives to introduce temperature and rainfall in a gravity model. The dataset used comprises interregional tourism flows by Spanish residents from 2011 to 2015. We first estimate a benchmark model with both temperature and rainfall at the destination expressed in levels, and then consider some extensions to this model. In particular, special attention is paid to analyzing whether the sensitivity that tourists may have to weather factors can change across seasons. Other modelling issues examined include the relationship between climatic variables at the destination and at home, the influence of weather in previous periods (lagged values of temperature and rain), the variability of the weather variables (captured by the standard deviation of these variables), or whether the effect of temperature varies with the climatic characteristics of the region. Our empirical results confirm that spring and summer tourism in Spain is more sensitive to weather conditions, that the number of domestic overnight stays in Spain is strongly influenced by changes in the difference in temperature between tourists' home and destination regions, that the estimated parameters of lagged weather variables are higher than those corresponding to the travelling months, that temperature variability in the destination region reduces tourism demand, and that the effect of temperature on destination choice for residents in moderate-climate regions is lower than for residents in other types of regions. 天气状况是旅游需求的重要决定因素。本文在回顾了以往关于气候变量在旅游需求函数中的作用的研究成果后, 我们探索了在重力模型中引入温度和降雨的不同建模方案。使用的数据集包括2011年至2015年西班牙居民的跨地区旅游流量。我们首先用水平表示的目的地温度和降雨量来估计基准模型, 然后考虑对该模型的一些扩展。特别要注意的是, 游客对天气因素的敏感性是否会随着季节的变化而变化。研究涉及的其他建模问题包括目的地与客源地气候变量之间的关系,天气的影响在上一时期(以温度和降雨作为滞后值),天气变量的变异性(这些变量的标准差),或者温度随地区气候特征而变化的效应。实证结果证实, 西班牙春季和夏季旅游对天气状况更为敏感,国内在西班牙过夜游客量受游客客源地和目的地温差的显著影响,天气滞后变量的估计参数高于相应旅行月份的同期值,目的地地区温度变化减少了旅游需求,温度对中等气候地区居民目的地选择的影响小于其他气候类型地区居民。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a classic piece, Przeworski and Sprague describe an electoral dilemma of social democratic parties: they need to attract middle-class voters without losing support in the shrinking working-class. With cultural issues (e.g. immigration) becoming more salient, this dilemma has intensified recently as the positions of both classes differ markedly on those issues. Against this background, we analyse the class base of social democratic parties in 13 Western European countries using data from the European Social Survey (2002–2018). Our exploratory study shows that in almost all countries support for social democrats has decreased across all classes. Yet, we still find significant differences in the social democrats' class bases. In Denmark, Sweden or Spain, social democrats still largely base their support on service and particularly production workers, while in France or Switzerland, these groups no longer primarily vote for social democrats. Here middle-class people, particularly socio-cultural professionals, are the strongest supporters of social democrats. Countries such as Germany or Norway exhibit no clear social democratic class base and gaining support from both groups at the same time seems to be most difficult. Only the British Labour Party succeeded to some extent in the balancing act of winning both middle- and working-class voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As occupations of squares in Spain spread across Europe, the Spanish Indignados gave rise to a transnational movement of ordinary citizens united in their anger against the banks, corruption, the electoral system, the global financial system, and the press. In this article, we reflect upon the legacies of the Spanish and Greek Indignados and show how their collective self-understanding—that is, a sense of a "us"—is formed and articulated very differently in Spain and Greece through square politics. We argue that it is the dramaturgy of political protest that fundamentally constructs and shapes the collective self-understanding of the Indignados in Spain and Greece. We will see that while in Spain there is a clearer sense of a shared political project and a shared identity, in Greece social movement actors were divided by their particular agendas and sectarian identities, which resulted in different articulations of their collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this intensive longitudinal study was (1) to explore the temporal evolution of two mental health indicators (anxiety and depressive symptoms, and insomnia) throughout COVID-19 lockdown in Spain, and (2) to examine its association with two work-related stressors (job insecurity and work-family conflict). A sample of 1519 participants responded to several questionnaires during the lockdown (between 16 March and 29 April 2020). Results of latent growth modelling showed a curvilinear increase of our two mental health indicators over time (a logarithmic growth for anxiety and depression, accentuated during the first part of the lockdown, and a quadratic growth for insomnia, accentuated during the second part). Regarding its association with work-related stressors, we found that higher levels of job insecurity and work-family conflict were related to higher levels of anxiety, depression, and insomnia. Additionally, we found a significant interaction between time and the two forms of work-family conflict (work-to-home and home-to-work), showing that people with more work-family conflict experienced stronger growth in all mental-health indicators. Overall, this study contributes to the description of the temporal dynamics of mental health during the COVID-19 outbreak in Spain, as well as its association with two key work-related stressors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The housing booms and busts in Ireland and Spain were among the most striking episodes of the Eurozone crisis. While asset price inflation and financialization of housing was gathering pace across the developed world, these two 'most different' cases converged on the same outcome as the most extreme forms of construction-based bubbles. The key contributions of this paper are threefold. Firstly, we show how cheap credit can be understood as analogous to a natural resource such as oil: resource abundance generates a 'paradox of plenty' whereby an asset becomes a liability. Secondly, we open the black box of political pathways through which this happens, expanding our understanding of how perverse outcomes are produced. Thirdly, we account for why Spain and Ireland were more susceptible to extreme outcomes than other European countries, thereby extending our understanding of asymmetries in the political economy of the Eurozone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout recent history, the Spanish economy registered a fiscal surplus only between 2005 and 2007. Analysts agree that this surplus was a product of the extraordinary economic growth, but they often fail to notice that it was based on similarly exceptional growth in private debt, which was a necessary condition for achieving fiscal surplus. This finding can be illuminated from the vantage of sectoral balances: in economies that usually run a current account deficit, such as Spain's, a public surplus can be achieved only in situations characterized by a credit bubble. To verify this idea we examine the impact that the Spanish real estate and credit bubble had on public accounts, and we also estimate an econometric model of autoregressive vectors. The results corroborate the working hypothesis: Spain's only fiscal surplus in recent years was achieved thanks to the largest private indebtedness process in the country's history. This evidence could have important implications in terms of economic policy, because economies with regular current account deficits such as Spain could have difficulties in achieving their fiscal goals without experiencing credit booms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the activism made possible by so-called digital feminism. The communication structure of digital media is behind the expansion and diffusion that the feminist movement is experiencing today. We argue that despite the mass appeal made possible by this communication structure, hegemonic powers may thwart the advance of the feminist agenda if this online movement does not lead to street mobilization. In other words: if online mobilization does not overcome the limitations of individual digital actions, the feminist movement is at risk of being co-opted by neoliberalism. We analyze two dimensions of digital feminism: the individual neoliberal dimension and the one that entails political action in the streets. To this end, we will focus on analysis of the 2019 8M feminist strike as a successful example of the latter case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of a Spanish university that sheds light on the precarious nature of many academic posts. It looks at how women academics build their careers in the current neoliberal university, which measures scholarly output through the indexing metric. Application of this yardstick renders many academic careers all the more precarious because it fails to take into account women's care commitments. Because the issue is 'hidden', it is one that is hard to remedy. Based on a quantitative and qualitative methodology, the study's empirical data revealed that the neoliberal university discriminates against women by overlooking the care burden they bear. We conclude that needs to base itself on non-androcentric principles in which care is a key component. This would avoid academia penalizing those people who either require or provide care – especially women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the logic of economic incentive from the perspective of the teaching staff working within the Andalusian (Spain) state education system. We start from the interpretive paradigm in order to understand how neoliberalisation processes and the New Public Management (NPM) are perceived within the context of state education in Spain. Drawing on thirty interviews, conducted with secondary school teachers, we offer a content analysis and their assembly with the grounded theory. Our main focus is on how economic incentives are perceived in terms of their either acceptance, or rejection, by the teaching staff. The NPM is spreading throughout the field of education, as is teacher resistance and opposition to these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the evolution of Spain's capitalism during the last decades in order to unveil the factors underlying the harshness with which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Spain. We present a twofold thesis. On the one hand, we argue that Spanish capitalism has harbored certain internal vulnerabilities, relative to its productive specialization, its labor market, its welfare institutions, and indebtedness levels, which successive boom and busts have reproduced and ultimately exacerbated. On the other hand, we contend that these various vulnerabilities have abruptly come to the fore with the irruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, thus accounting for its singularly dramatic consequences. In order to substantiate our hypotheses, we provide a political economy analysis of the recent trajectory of Spanish capitalism. The economic boom initiated in the 1990s developed various vulnerabilities, which the years following the onset of the Great Recession did not attenuate and to which various others were added during the last expansion phase, all coming to the fore with the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing attention on the need for dynamic approaches to manage organisational change in order to sustain competitive advantage in changing business environments. Current frameworks and methods are misleading in terms of the fact that flexibility is a temporal and dynamic condition for survival in environments with a high degree of variability in most real-world organisations. This study aims to examine determinants underpinning organisational change strategies throughout the enterprise lifecycle in order to develop a predictive method that will help managers in the design of effective change options dealing with the complexity of organisational flexibility. A system dynamics model was constructed based on theoretical and empirical data from a case study of a Spanish cooperative company. Then, the predictive method shows the impact of managers' decisions on organisational flexibility through simulations. The effectiveness of change strategies is investigated through the dynamic behaviour of key variables. These factors cause relevant delays on the desired results and could force firms to choose an inappropriate path for change. This study offers significant implications for theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Ecuador's worst economic downturn in 1999, women left the country in the thousands. They migrated for economic reasons but also hoping to distance themselves from gendered duties and obligations that confined them to oppressive feminine roles. Less than a decade later they bought into Spain's housing bubble in an effort to 'make up' for their departure. I argue that Ecuadorian migrant women's decisions to buy mortgaged homes in Barcelona were in part informed by their conceptualizations of domesticity, care giving, and motherhood. For women portrayed as culpables or 'culprits' for leaving Ecuador and failing to upkeep their caregiving responsibilities in their country of origin, the promise of homeownership became a way of accomplishing complex forms of transnational caregiving as well as upward mobility. This article focuses on gendered conceptualizations of care, motherhood, and kinship amongst Ecuadorian migrant women and the relationship these notions have with housing financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper questions the view of a narrow connection between global constraints and internal policy choices of European nation states according to which 'Deregulation' and the reduction of state expenditure are seen as the only possibilities that decision-makers in labour market and social policy have at their disposal. Theoretically, it is argued that countries with relatively high taxes can remain attractive for international capital as long as they offer a highly qualified labour force able to produce high quality commodities. Different productivity levels then correspond with a spectrum of post-Fordist growth strategies the ends of which are characterised as 'capital-oriented flexibility' and 'negotiated flexibility'. Empirically, the paper interprets recent reforms of labour markets and welfare states in the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden, Spain, and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors show the extremely negative impact of having inexperienced directors with minimal or no knowledge of economics or finance serving on the boards of directors of Spanish savings banks. The failure of the savings banks would have bankrupted the Spanish banking sector and so the government had to invest public money to rescue it. Other public spending was therefore drastically reduced. The authors call for banks to be depoliticized and for their supervisory systems to be strengthened to guarantee their solvency in the long term. The heavy politicization of the corporate governance of the Spanish savings banks is shown in this paper to be a key factor explaining a large number of defaults. The authors explain the effect of political influence on savings banks boards of directors and provide empirical evidence about the factors that led to both poor performance and failures. The authors found a negative association between the percentage of savings banks' board members appointed by politicians and performance. The demise of savings banks was important in terms of the public sector finances because the Spanish government had to spend millions of euros to rescue the banking system, with consequent cuts in government spending in other areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers seem to view meaning in life as consisting of different dimensions: coherence, purpose, and significance. Meaning in life has been found to be a protective factor against several mental disorders, and an association between meaning in life and the psychopathology of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) has been found. The aim of this study is to analyze the role of the dimensions of meaning in life. The sample was composed of 102 participants with BPD diagnoses from mental health services in Spain, and all of them filled out the BSL-23, PIL-10, MLQ, and OLQ questionnaires. The results suggest that BPD symptoms are negatively correlated with meaning in life. The meaning in life dimensions' model accounted for 52% of the variance in BPD symptoms. The variables that significantly predicted BPD symptoms were: Meaning and Satisfaction, Comprehensibility (coherence), and Purpose and Vital Goals. The present study emphasizes meaning in life as an important variable in BPD psychopathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial accessibility as a way of ensuring financial inclusion has received increasing attention. However, most of studies have drawn attention to the likelihood of becoming branchless and not on the differential characteristics of branchless municipalities. The aim this paper is to assess financial accessibility in branchless municipalities of the most populated region of Spain, Andalusia, and to examine their distribution across space. To that end, we identify the nearest bank branch for each branchless municipality. In addition, we incorporate socio-economic characteristics of each municipality in order to identify different groups of branchless municipalities. The results obtained suggest that there are substantial differences across branchless municipalities. In particular, we identify two degrees of financial accessibility: moderate and poor. Population dynamics are revealed as a key factor in explaining financial accessibility although this can be ameliorated by a higher per capita income and a greater industrial specialization. From a territorial point of view, we find a high concentration of branchless municipalities across space. Some initiatives should be taken in order to avoid that people become financially excluded. In this sense, local action groups responsible for rural development policies could identify the main negative effects and propose the most suitable alternative services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is much literature on the Europeanization of social movements, yet work tends not to theorize the influence of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) upon social movements. I examine the extent to which EU-imposed austerity in Southern Europe inspired European protests among German, Spanish and French trade unions. On the basis of an analytic framework which distinguishes between (i) Europeanization and (ii) continuing attachment to national institutions, I contend that degrees of Europeanization are contingent upon position within EMU. Unions in weak positions have incentives to undertake Europeanization, as in the case of Spain, whilst unions within strong positions have less incentive to undertake Europeanization, as in the case of Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the development of mass media policy in Spain from 1977 to 1990. Communication system of the Francoist State in the 1970s; Concentration and transnationalization within democratic Spain; Privatization of the state press by public auction in 1983; Influence of communication policy on the configuration of the communication system.

From a corporate governance point of view, this paper addresses the question of how corporate ownership and board characteristics influence firm value for a sample of Ibero-American companies. Specifically, we analyse indexed non-financial companies from Chile and Spain for the period 2007 – 2016, using the GMM panel data technique. Our research is novel in considering a two-country approach, with one emerging and one developed country, and in analysing how corporate ownership and board characteristics, in addition to contextual variables, determine firm value. Our results assess the efficiency of corporate governance mechanisms. Although findings are intriguing regarding ownership concentration, they confirm the benefits of a good board of directors. This type of board is characterised by a large size, sufficiently independent directors, and a balance in terms of gender diversity. We provide several policy recommendations from our main findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to analyse the profitability of ski resorts in Spain and identify its associated determining factors in order to verify whether these are economically sustainable taking into account the internal and external aspects affecting them. To this end, the article first addresses the importance of snow tourism in Spain, before going on to analyse the influence that climate change is having on this type of tourism. A series of economic and structural ratios are then applied to the financial statements of ski resorts in Spain with the aim of establishing a base diagnosis for their situation. Finally, a regression model is estimated, the results of which reveal the more profitable ski resorts at the economic level to be those with the largest stations, a direct relationship being observed between profitability and size. The results also confirm the negative consequences of high indebtedness and the non-significant effects of using snowmaking systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recruitment of international-student athletes (ISAs) to NCAA schools in the United States has been a feature of intercollegiate athletics since the late 1940's and an influx of foreign-born athletes became evident from the late 1960s and through the 1970s. More recently, the number of ISAs increased drastically from the 1990s to the 2000s and this growth trend has continued. Similar to previous research on migration patterns of ISAs in NCAA basketball and soccer, the purpose of this study was to explore talent migration in NCAA Division I (DI) tennis. The authors incorporate discussions on globalization and world-system theory to explicate global sport labor migration and analyze descriptive player and coach data to understand: (1) the extent of ISAs competing in NCAA DI tennis in comparison to other sports; (2) distribution of tennis ISAs across three DI categories and thirty-one conferences; (3) migration patterns of DI tennis ISAs with respect to country and city of origin; and, (4) the percentage of international tennis coaches in DI. Findings indicate tennis has the highest percentage of ISAs among all NCAA sports, ISAs make up the majority of all men's and women's tennis players at the DI level, Spain is the top donor nation, and the percentage of international coaches for DI teams is approximately 30%. The authors conclude the paper with commentary informed by veteran DI tennis coaches regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the future of college tennis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the spatiality of the proliferation of short-term rentals in Spain. It was based on geolocalised data for all the Airbnb listings in the country. A multiscale analysis enabled us to identify the socio-economic, tourism market and housing stock variables that have had the greatest influence on the proliferation of short-term rental offers. The results obtained confirmed a pattern of concentration that validates our central hypothesis: the uneven distribution of Airbnb listings has a strong spatial correlation with the potential for generating new profits in the housing market. At national level, the urban areas with the highest concentration of Airbnb listings are those with the highest tourist demand. These are the largest cities, coastal tourist regions and archipelagos. At the city level, clusters of Airbnb concentrations are located in central areas where short-term rentals tend to be more expensive. They are also located in working-class neighbourhoods with lower housing prices with great potential for investors due to their proximity to tourist sites. These findings provide new evidence of how the so-called sharing economy is playing a central role in the intensification of the commodification of housing and how this is correlated with the intensive touristification of urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1990, an irregular migration industry has flourished in different cities of Indian Punjab because of the eagerness among young men to emigrate at any cost and increased border controls imposed by the European Union. In Europe, the majority of irregular immigrants from Punjab end up in Spain or Italy due to continuous regularisation programmes, support from social networks and the availability of informal jobs. In this paper, with a thematic analysis of 72 in-depth interviews with irregular immigrants from Punjab in Italy or Spain, their relatives in Punjab and members of the host community, this paper explores the main causes and consequences of Punjabi irregular immigration in Italy and Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between housing prices and their main fundamental determinants using the example of Spain and considering the possibility of structural breaks in the relationship. We find that the cointegrating coefficient estimates are quite unstable over 2001Q1-2017Q4 and need to be estimated for different subperiods. Specifically we find that the main long-run fundamentals explain the behaviour of equilibrium house prices well during the boom-bust period. However, only corporate profit, or capital income, seems to explain the evolution after the recovery from the recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anti-austerity movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and 2010 Eurozone crisis, and which forms part of the 'age of austerity' that came after those crises, was underpinned by a set of ideas and practices that we refer to here as 'pragmatic prefigurativism'. Whilst the anti-austerity movements typically rejected formal ideologies such as Marxism and anarchism, nevertheless pragmatic prefigurativism can be understood as a 'left convergence' of sorts. The paper explores the features of this pragmatic prefigurativism, comparing the anti-austerity movements in the UK and Spain. In particular, we note the role of unresponsive institutions of democracy in prompting the move towards pragmatic prefigurativism, the adoption of techniques of direct democracy and direct action as the means through which to express a voice and to refuse austerity, and the pragmatic nature of the subsequent (re)turn to political institutions when this became a possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responses to the Great Recession are varied across welfare states and gendered in their consequences. Combining gender, social policy and social movement scholarship, this paper investigates how the differential policy responses to the Financial Crisis in three European countries shaped gender-differences in anti-austerity demonstrations. We compare the involvement and characteristics of women and men in anti-austerity protests using data collected at street demonstrations (2010–2012). We conduct cross-national multi-level analysis of demonstrators from countries representing different gender regimes (Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Our results show that gender regimes have a significant impact on women's and men's involvement in anti-austerity protests. We thus make an important contribution to research on gender differences in participation in anti-austerity demonstrations post-Great Recession. Our comparison of women's and men's participation in anti-austerity street demonstrations suggests that at the country or regime level resources matter more than grievances, but that grievances matter at the individual level. This innovative paper links scholarship on gender regimes with research on protest participation. Resources and experiences of grievances are shaped by gender regimes which provide access to decision-making and social support. We reveal novel insights into the connection between gender regimes and demonstration participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the main problems facing the Spanish Tagus River basin, and the management that has caused (or allowed) them. It examines the economic, social, environmental and political-institutional dimensions of Tagus River management in terms of sustainable development. We find that the institutions responsible for designing and implementing water policy in the Tagus basin have been unsuccessful in balancing the three classic dimensions of sustainability, resulting in systematic and recurrent failure to comply with the European Water Framework Directive and the principles of sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than twenty years in Spain, national series and telenovelas were broadcast alongside Latin American telenovelas, which have gradually decreased until practically disappearing from the screens. Although the production of Spanish fiction goes back as far as the arrival of television, the truth is that the disaffection with the Latin American telenovela and the consolidation of Spanish fiction may have brought with it the transfer of narrative, aesthetic and cultural codes upon the which the new model of Spanish audiovisual fiction was built. This article1 analyzes these characteristics in both models from the comparative analysis of broadcast titles. The results show similarities in the superimposed structure of the plots and the use of drama, while differences include the design of characters and the preference for certain themes and settings related to the cultural spaces in which the stories occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different tourism development models have different implications in terms of their economic, social and environmental impact. This article analyses the sustainability of tourism development models and, specifically, the extent to which private vehicles are used in view of the urban configuration arising from the implementation of either a more intensive model (holiday) or a more extensive one (residential). To do this, the degree of motorization has been analysed in a sample of tourist destinations on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands. The results obtained indicate that residential destinations uses more intensively the private vehicles than holiday ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to the widespread view which posits that large current account deficits and net international debt were at the epicenter of the crisis in the Euro Zone, with diverging competitiveness playing a central role, this article points to the huge volume of bank credit that banks refinanced in international markets. With a focus on the Spanish economy, we ground our view in an analysis linking gross—not net—capital flows, bank credit, and gross external debt, which provides more adequate information about a country's international financing patterns and its external exposure. The main conclusion of this article is that the principle driver of gross external debt in Spain was bank credit, with accumulated current account deficits accounting for less than 50 percent of gross external debt. Other consequences in keeping with this view are: the measures of economic policy required to sort out current account imbalances—particularly wage devaluation to improve competitiveness—may do more harm than good and they do not prevent the problem of too much bank credit from occurring again, and the residence of debt holders in the Euro Zone crisis is relevant for the understanding of the crisis as the result of a power imbalance [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores trade union influence over human resource management (HRM) practices in Spanish and Brazilian organizations using the Cranet 2014 dataset. While some of the existing data suggest that trade unions may hold little power within surveyed organizations, we offer additional evidence contradicting this. Trade unions' influence is better understood when taking into account the industrial relations systems of Spain and Brazil, as well as their historical evolution. Understanding such evolution helps us account for similarities and differences observed in the way trade unions influence HRM in these two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the dynamics of fiscal consolidation and public sector reforms in Italy and Spain under the EU governance that took shape as a reaction to the Eurozone crisis. We show how three types of EU pressure – fiscal and economic coordination rules, conditionality, and back-room diplomacy have operated in conjunction. We also show that Italy was more willing than Spain to resist EU pressure. Based on a Two-Level Game framework, we argue that this can be explained by the greater opposition to European integration that has developed in Italy compared to Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we study the development of the financial crisis in Spain from a Minskyan perspective. In the first part we present the theoretical framework based on Minsky and Kindleberger's work where regulatory failures, financial innovation, and great optimism during the growth stage are key to explain the increased financial fragility. We then use the stages proposed by Kindleberger to show that the same ones can be identified and analyzed for the Spanish crisis, where the critical events have unfolded following a Minskyan approach, from the full capacity of the agents to meet payment obligations to their gradual inability of doing so. As this happened, the balance sheets interconnectedness of agents in the economy untied a severe contagion effect throughout the entire economy. We also document a variety of political shifts and regulatory mismanagement issues, both prior and after the crisis, with a significant impact on the evolution of the Spanish financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Italian and Spanish models of growth and analyses labour market, human capital and innovation policy reforms since the mid 1990s. The comparison with France and Germany shows the constraints that have hindered the rise of institutional complementarities and the competitiveness of the two Mediterranean countries already before the introd uction of the euro and the outbreak of the 2008 crisis. The analysis highlights both similarities and structural differences between Italy and Spain and demonstrates the long-term institutional conditions that explain why the economic breakdown has had such a deep impact on the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the evolution and institutional transformation of the Welfare State and its relationship with the Third Sector of Social Action, the present article describes and analyzes the aspects of the financial crisis and resources that the sector is currently suffering. In regards of these structural transformations the evolution, characteristics, limitations and opportunities offered by ‘civic crowdfunding’ in Spain between the years 2011 and 2015 as an innovative social practice for the increase of the own funding between the entities of the Third Sector of Social Action and the changes that must be experienced by the sector in order to optimize and improve its self-funding ratios through this mechanism are examined. The high index of success of financing social projects (96.5%) through this tool, and the annual growth during the analyzed period shows the potential of civic crowdfuding. On the other hand, the small size of the bankable projects (95.2% less than 10,000 euros), as well as the low total amount collected (2,665,384 euros) indicates that civic crowdfunding is still an insufficient mechanism to mitigate the severe public resource cuts suffered by the entities of the Third Sector of Social Action and also to bring these entities closer to the objective of self-financing. Finally, we formulated a series of recommendations aimed at improving the self-financing ratios of the Third Sector of Social Action, including a more efficient and cooperative use of civic crowdfunding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hoteliers have steadily been able to reduce costs and increase employees’ workload as a result of mass unemployment sparked by the financial crisis, beginning in 2008, and associated legislative reforms by the Spanish government. Outsourcing has been hotels’ main instrument in this drive. Hotel chambermaids are among the groups most affected by this phenomenon. This article analyses the impacts of outsourcing on hotel maids’ working conditions, while questioning the possibilities for achieving inclusive tourism given the current outsourcing trend. It is based on 44 in-depth interviews with a range of informants, including 24 hotel maids who have experienced the process of outsourcing, in major Spanish tourism destinations. This study aims to understand the changes these workers have experienced and perceived in their working conditions. The research results highlight a marked deterioration in hotel maids’ working conditions in recent years, most notably involving (a) a reduction in their salary and the loss of professional categories, (b) work overload, (c) greater uncertainty in the duration of employment, timetables and work schedule, (d) de-professionalisation, (e) segmentation, division and an increase in competition between hotel staff, (f) the accentuation of health problems and (g) a decrease in the capacity of representation and the defence of workers’ collective interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]