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We exploit historical differences in foral law to consistently estimate the contribution of the quality of enforcement institutions to economic specialization across Spanish provinces in the period 1999-2014. The distribution of economic activity in Spain as of today shows a strong pattern of geographical specialization. Regions less specialized in...
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... have obtained data for three jurisdictions, more specifically those mainly related to the economic activity of enterprises and citizens: the administrative, labor and civil jurisdictions. Figure 3 provides a scheme of the Spanish judicial system. First, a company may have to negotiate with the public administrations in its daily activities. Several domains are affected by that type of interactions: ranging from the payment of taxes to obtaining zoning permits to construct an industrial warehouse. Conflicts arising from the contact between citizens or companies and the public administration will be usually solved by the jurisdiction for suits under administrative Law (or administrative jurisdiction). In parallel, a company may have conflicts with its employees. For instance, a dismissal conflict which arrives to the judicial system will be resolved by the labor jurisdiction. 8 Finally, on a daily basis a company may have conflicts with other private firms or citizens such as suppliers and customers: for instance misinterpretations of private contracts (loans, intellectual property, etc), management of the dissatisfaction with the quality of a product or the problems in the reception of intermediate goods. All those conflicts will be solved by the civil ("private") ...
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... For instance, the literature shows that the small size of Spanish companies has a negative impact on the economy's productivity, which is also low (Dolado et al., 2016;Mora-Sanguinetti and P erez-Valls, 2020). Likewise, the bias toward non-industrial productive sectors, which could be implied by judicial inefficacy, also has an effect on long-term economic growth (Mora-Sanguinetti and Spruk, 2018). ...
... Finally, our results point to sectors such as industry or trade suffering more in a context of legal uncertainty, which implies less investment. Again, the result has broader economic efficiency implications: development and sectoral specialization may be linked (Mora-Sanguinetti and Spruk, 2018). In Spain, the regions less specialized in industrial activities show below-average economic development. ...
The negative impact of judicial inefficiency on investment decisions has been examined theoretically, supported by aggregate empirical studies at the country level. Whether this effect is observed at the firm level, however -and under what circumstances and through what channels it occurs- has yet to be determined. This paper fills the gap by analyzing the problem empirically for the period 2002–2016 using information from 650,000 firms (3.5 million observations). Our approach is novel, because it shows that the impact is greater in large companies than small ones, that it occurs more strongly in industrial companies, and that the civil (private) jurisdiction is the crucial one in achieving efficiency improvements. These findings are important for aggregate productivity growth.
... Destaca el hecho de que, dentro del número de autónomos sin asalariados, se incluyan 9.467 autónomos económicamente dependientes (0,61% del total de autónomos sin asalariados). Este colectivo no se dedica a una actividad empresarial, sino a trabajadores autónomos que tienen una fuerte relación de dependencia con una empresa, para la cual trabajan (casi) en exclusiva y de la cual dependen más del 75% de sus ingresos, a la vez que apenas tienen control sobre aspectos clave de su trabajo (Malo, 2018 Más allá de trabajar con datos relativos al tamaño medido por número de empleados, resulta especialmente interesante, con el objetivo de indagar en esta realidad de la que hasta ahora sólo se ha navegado por la superficie, atender a la forma jurídica de estructurar las empresas y su evolución a lo largo de los últimos años. En este sentido, en España, de un total de 3.373.646 ...
España es, bajo una perspectiva estructural y cultural, un país de Pymes. No cabe duda de esta afirmación cuando los datos ilustran una realidad en la que el 99,9% del tejido empresarial español está compuesto por Pymes. Sin embargo, detrás de esta realidad se esconde otra no menos importante: más del 55% de las empresas no tienen asalariados. La importancia de los empresarios autónomos es reflejo del espíritu emprendedor que fundamenta la economía española. Sin embargo, a pesar de las numerosas medidas destinadas a fomentar el emprendimiento, no se presta suficiente atención a la sostenibilidad de dichos proyectos emprendedores, es decir, al fracaso.
Bajo este contexto, el presente trabajo tiene como objetivo indagar en los
principales factores que amenazan la supervivencia a un año de los empresarios
autónomos. Mediante un análisis multinivel basado en los datos de la EPA, se
busca, por un lado, entender los factores sociodemográficos que caracterizan a
los empresarios que no han prosperado en su proyecto mientras que, por otro lado,
se pretende indagar en los factores de naturaleza macroeconómica e institucional,
resultando significativos el crecimiento del PIB, la tasa de desempleo,
la deuda pública, la evolución del crédito la evolución de la presión fiscal, la
carga regulatoria y la eficiencia del sistema judicial, todas medidas desde una
perspectiva autonómica.
... If enforcing contracts becomes very difficult, agents may decide not to sign certain agreements. For instance, this risk seems critical in the case of investment decisions (Nunn 2007;Mora-Sanguinetti and Spruk 2018). North (1994) considered "enforcement" as part of the "institutions" i.e. constraints that structure human interactions. ...
The adoption of court fees has been traditionally justified as a means to improve the performance of enforcement institutions as they may have an effect of deterrence of the dispute. Judicial congestion has clear negative impacts on economic performance. Spain, which has one of the highest rates of litigation of the OECD, has traditionally lacked a general system of court fees. In 2002, the Congress passed a system of court fees to be paid by legal entities and enterprises. In 2012, the fees were extended to individuals and abrogated in 2015. This bounded period of enforcement allows us to empirically test the impacts of court fees on congestion. In order to do this, we collected a comprehensive database of quarterly data on the real workload of civil courts. This study concludes that the effects of court fees, although reduced courts’ congestion, are far from homogeneous and depend on the type of procedure, the workload of the courts and the local macroeconomic conditions.
We analyze the impact of regulatory complexity on economic activity and its heterogeneous impact on firms. We use a novel database that classifies more than 200,000 regulations adopted in Spain between 1995 and 2020. Exploiting this rich database, we are able to estimate the exposure to regulatory complexity of industries located in different Spanish sub-national regions. We find that an increase in regulatory complexity has an impact on economic activity, reducing employment. Entry of new firms in sectors-regions exposed to higher regulatory complexity is also lower. These effects are heterogeneous across firms, with negative effects concentrated in smaller and more recently established firms. This evidence emphasizes the importance of both the aggregate and distributional impact of regulatory complexity.
JEL CODES: K2; R11; J00; E02.
This paper studies for first time the impact of the regulatory complexity by sector in Spain on various measures of economic efficiency. We base our analysis on an innovative database that classifies 206,777 regulations by sector of activity and by region which highlights the growing volume of regulation, as well as its diversity by sector, by region and by business cycle stage.
This analysis first looks at the aggregate impacts of sectoral regulatory complexity on the employment-to-population ratio, total working hours, sectoral GDP shares, labor intensity or capital intensity, but it delves, in the second place, into the heterogenous impacts observed over firms with different sizes and ages, making use of a rich database at the enterprise level, the MCVL - Continuous Work History Sample-.
On the first front, we estimate a set of multiple fixed-effects model specifications across 13 economic sectors, 23 regulatory sectors and 17 Spanish regions over the period 1995-2020. Our results suggest that greater regulatory complexity has a negative effect on employment rate and has a negative impact on value added. The effect on employment is consistent with previous findings for the U.S. In particular, each additional increase in regulatory complexity index is associated with 0.7 percent drop in the sector-level employment share, ceteris paribus. Furthermore, our results suggest that several distortionary sector-level effects of increasing regulatory complexity are taking place. Markedly lower labor intensity and decreased sector-level investment rates, which confirm that expansive regulatory complexity entails non-trivial sector-level costs. Distortionary effects of regulatory complexity materialize through compositional differences mainly through reduced wages and investment rate.
On the second front, using data on employment by firms’ characteristics, we show that the negative impact of regulatory complexity concentrates on smaller and younger firms. This finding supports the hypothesis that a more complex regulation imposes a burden than small and less experienced firms are less capable to handle. At the sector level, the group of sectors more negatively affected is manufacturing. This may be related to the higher investment required by these sectors.
JEL CODES: K2; R11; J00; E02.
En periodos de crisis económica es habitual que las empresas se acojan al concurso de acreedores para superar una situación de declive e insolvencia. En el presente trabajo se evalúa la efectividad de las acciones estratégicas de recuperación en el contexto de crisis empresarial de mayor gravedad, como es la situación del concurso de acreedores. A tal fin, se ha efectuado un análisis longitudinal sobre una muestra de 868 empresas españolas declaradas en concurso de acreedores en el periodo 2004-2017. Los resultados revelan que incrementar las ventas contribuye de forma positiva a superar el proceso concursal de forma exitosa, esto es, sobreviviendo y mejorando la rentabilidad, mientras que efectuar inversiones en activo no muestra efectos significativos en el incremento de probabilidad de supervivencia y éxito. Las empresas exitosas adicionalmente adoptaron acciones de recortes de costes y activos con las que pudieron obtener los recursos necesarios para impulsar su negocio incluso durante el concurso de acreedores. Estos hallazgos sugieren que las empresas en situación de concurso de acreedores deberían adoptar estrategias de recuperación focalizadas en sus ventas, para lo cual será necesario que previamente hayan adoptado acciones de reducción de activos improductivos y gastos superfluos, que proporcionen la base para la posterior recuperación.
During economic downturns, firms file for bankruptcy in an effort to attempt a “turnaround.” The objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of retrenchment strategies in the context of bankruptcy, as the most severe form of crisis. We conducted a longitudinal analysis of a sample of 868 bankrupt Spanish firms during the period 2004–2017. The empirical results show that stakeholder support and deep cost retrenchment increase the likelihood of survival and performance recovery, while aggressive layoffs are detrimental for turning bankrupt firms around. Surprisingly, intense asset retrenchment had no significant effects on firm survival and also pushed performance downward. The findings suggest that retrenchment should not be regarded as a general remedy for firms suffering the most severe of crisis. Bankrupt firms should focus on restoring stakeholder relationships and reducing superfluous expenses, while making employees redundant or selling assets should be evaluated carefully when attempting a turnaround.
JEL CLASSIFICATION M10; G33
A third of industrial employment is in large companies (more than 250 employees), which represent only 0.4% of industrial companies, but which invoice 55.5% of sales. 84.9% of industrial companies had fewer than ten workers in 2018 (Official data from the Spanish administration (INE 1998; INE, Anuario Estadístico de España, 2002–2018; INE, Inebase, 2018a; INE, España en cifras, 2018b)). The autonomous communities contributing more than 10% of the sales figure in 2015 were Catalonia (23.6%), Andalusia (11.2%), the Valencian Community (10.7%), and the Basque Country (10.0%).
During economic downturns, firms file for bankruptcy in an effort to attempt a ‘turnaround’. The objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of retrenchment strategies in the context of bankruptcy, as the most severe form of crisis. We conducted a longitudinal analysis of a sample of 868 bankrupt Spanish firms during the period 2004–2017. The empirical results show that stakeholder support and deep cost retrenchment increase the likelihood of survival and performance recovery, while aggressive layoffs are detrimental for turning bankrupt firms around. Surprisingly, intense asset retrenchment had no significant effects on firm survival and also pushed performance downwards. The findings suggest that retrenchment should not be regarded as a general remedy for firms suffering the most severe of crisis. Bankrupt firms should focus on restoring stakeholder relationships and reducing superfluous expenses, while making employees redundant or selling assets should be evaluated carefully when attempting a turnaround.
