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Tesis con mención internacional, The choice of the spatial scale for conducting the empirical analysis should be a fundamental initial step in regional economics. Even when scholars in regional economics have paid attention for decades (Openshaw, 1984) to the role played by this scale, which must be consistent with the assumptions and the theoretical framework, the traditional lack of geographically disaggregated data has forced regional economists to use information aggregated to a large scale and use administrative large regions in their empirical analysis. Statistical and econometric techniques have experienced important improvements in the last decades for the measurement of increasingly complex socio-economic phenomena (Islam, 2003). These improvements allow us to deal with issues as spatial dependence, nonlinearities or heterogeneity and making inferences on economic relationships and impacts in a much more accurate way., La elección de la escala espacial para llevar a cabo análisis empíricos debería ser un paso fundamental en la economía regional. Aunque los investigadores en economía regional han prestado atención durante décadas (Openshaw, 1984) al papel que juega la escala, que debe ser consistente con los supuestos y el marco teórico, la tradicional falta de información desagregada geográficamente ha obligado a los economistas regionales a usar datos agregados en grandes regiones administrativas para sus análisis empíricos. Las técnicas estadísticas y econométricas han experimentado mejoras importantes en la última década permitiendo la medición de fenómenos socioeconómicos cada vez más complejos (Islam, 2003). Esas mejoras nos permiten tratar temas como la dependencia espacial, las relaciones no lineales o la heterogeneidad, y hacer inferencias en relaciones económicas e impactos de una manera mucho más precisa.

The empirical analysis of regional convergence is normally based on data collected at the administrative divisions of the territory level. However, as endogenous growth theories highlighted, large cities and central areas usually grow faster than rural and peripheral areas. So, it could be more realistic considering that the dynamics that generate economic growth take place at a smaller scale. These potential differences across sub-regional areas might be lost if the analysis is made at the NUTS II or III level (in the case of the EU countries), generating the so-called Modifiable Area Unit Problem (MAUP). The objective of this paper is to explore to which extent the MAUP bias could affect convergence analysis. By means of a Montecarlo simulation, we study how the beta-convergence results could be affected by using different levels of geographical aggregation. Several hypotheses about the generating process of local growth are considered in the simulation, according with the neo-classical and the New Economic Geography models, and the relevance of the MAUP is evaluated under different theoretical scenarios

The increasing concentration of wealth distribution is becoming a very important issue in the analysis of inequality. The need to include wealth in the household inequality analysis is calling attention nowadays. However, there are no datasets that provide the level of geographical detail needed to analyse differences across the Spanish regions. This paper aims to fill this gap by the analysis of Spanish households. The methodology applied estimates asset-poverty indicators for the 17 Spanish NUTS2 regions by combining the use of the Survey of Household Finances (EFF) produced by the Bank of Spain (where the wealth indicators are observable at a national scale) and the Living Conditions Survey (SILC). In the second database the same variables we use from the first database are included with the advantage that in this one the variables are disaggregated according to autonomous communities. The main novelties of the proposed technique are the consistency of geographical mapping output with national aggregates, and it does not require strong distributional assumptions. According to this, we develop an analysis of the regional heterogeneity in the distribution of wealth from the Spanish households.

Las economías de aglomeración han sido muy importantes en el desarrollo de la economía, en especial en la economía regional, dónde presenta un importante peso en el crecimiento de los municipios y su evolución. En un primer lugar, se abordará este trabajo desde un punto de vista teórico, dando un repaso bibliográfico desde los inicios de las economías de aglomeración con el fin de poder ver cómo afectan en un ámbito geográfico determinado. En segundo lugar, se llevará a cabo un enfoque práctico, se agruparán los municipios en sistemas locales de trabajo para analizarlos y ver cómo afecta la distribución de la actividad a la renta per cápita de las personas que habitan en esos mercados locales de trabajo. El objetivo de este trabajo es ver cómo afectan las economías de aglomeración en la renta per cápita de las personas y ver las desigualdades existentes entre los distintos sistemas locales de trabajo.