Estefanía Mourelle

This work investigates the relationships between the retail payment system, monetary aggregates and economic activity in Spain from a long-run perspective. This approach is considered from the perspective of the transformations favored by ICT in the payment system, which incorporates increasingly more and more cashless instruments. The methodology used is based on cointegration analysis and error correction models. Likewise, a new indicator of some trends in the implementation of cashless transactions in payment systems is proposed; this measure has been applied to Spain and other European countries. With respect to long-run relationships, we demonstrate the relevant (and direct) impact of changes in the monetary system and national income on the value of cashless transactions. Regarding the short-run, the most important relationships in terms of the value of cashless transactions are those related to the real estate sector. The empirical results evidence the intensive progress of the cashless society in Spain, where the banking sector, regulatory changes and ICT development have played a key role.

Nutrition and the incidence of diseases during early life are considered environmental factors that determine people’s height when they become adults. While there is extensive literature focusing on the relationship between physical growth, general mortality and infant mortality rates, few studies analyse the impact of certain disease groups on the final height of historical populations. Using regional mortality rates by causes of death, the main objective of this study is to determine the onset of the disease environment during early life for populations born in Spain between 1916 and 1930, and its relationship with the stature reached at 21 years of age. A population-averaged model is performed on epidemic-infectious, gastrointestinal, and congenital diseases during the gestation period and first year of life. The disease burden in early life had a statistically significant negative effect on adult stature. These results support the premise that an improvement in the disease environment could lead to a greater number of short children surviving and therefore a decrease in the average height.

Purpose: Might a country’s economic growth performance differ depending on the evolution of its human capital? This paper aims to consider education as a channel for human capital improvement and then for economic growth. The authors hypothesize the existence of a threshold for education, after which point the characteristics of economic growth change.Design/methodology/approach: To address this question, the authors turn from a linear framework to a nonlinear one by applying smooth transition specifications.Findings: This empirical analysis for Spain points to the existence of nonlinearities in the relationship between education and economic growth at country level, for both secondary and tertiary education. Next, as different patterns emerge in different regions, the authors provide a regional analysis for a number of representative Spanish regions. The results show that both secondary and tertiary education matter for economic growth and that nonlinearities in this relationship should be taken into account.Practical implications: What is learnt from using Smooth Transition Regression models for the education-economic growth link is that the educational level of the population can be understood as a source of nonlinearities in the economic activity of a country (and of a region). Thus, depending on national and regional educational levels, economic growth behaves differently.Originality/value: Although the importance of nonlinearities has been identified, linearity is usually assumed in this field of the literature. This paper calls into question the linearity assumption by using time series techniques for 1971-2013 in Spain, an OECD country, and testing whether the results at country level hold for different regions within Spain as a robustness check.

Might a country’s economic growth behave in a different manner depending on the evolution of its absorptive capacity? In this research, education is considered as a channel for economic growth since it is a key element for a country’s absorptive capacity. Then, we hypothesize the existence of a threshold for absorptive capacity, so that once it is exceeded, economic growth shows certain (and different) characteristics. Addressing this question requires moving from the traditional linear framework to a nonlinear one and, in this sense, we resort to Smooth Transition specifications. The empirical results point to the existence of nonlinearities in the relationship between absorptive capacity and economic growth. According to the behavior of the country’s absorptive capacity, economic growth displays different dynamics; this asymmetric evolution is clearly appreciated in the two dimensions of absorptive capacity taken into account (i.e., secondary and tertiary), although it is more pronounced in case of tertiary education. Our evidence provides important insights for higher education such as the fact that both secondary and tertiary education matter for countries’ economic growth and that nonlinearities of this relationship should be taken on board.

In this article, we aim at modelling the long-run behaviour of the Real Effective Exchange Rates (REER) for a pool of African countries. Not much attention has been paid to this group of countries, in particular, to the existence of nonlinearities in the long-run path of such a variable. Controlling for two sources of nonlinearities, i.e. asymmetric adjustment to equilibrium and nonlinear deterministic trends allows us to gain some insight about the behaviour of the African REER. We find that these sources of nonlinearities help us to explain the apparent unit root behaviour found applying linear unit root tests for most of the countries.