Raul Rios-Rodríguez

Science and technology parks were conceived to promote firm performance and innovation, and they have become increasingly important in local and regional development policies. However, there are few empirical studies on their effectiveness as drivers of firm innovation, and existing studies have also reported mixed results, which could be due to small sample sizes and biases in the selection of control samples. To overcome these constraints, we analyse a sample of 553 firms located in parks and a control sample of firms located outside, selected through propensity score matching, which is a novel contribution to the literature. Portugal, a lower‐middle income country representative of the European periphery, is used as case study. The results indicate that location in parks positively and significantly affects having some patent activity, as well as the number of patents filed, but no significant effect is found for patents granted.

As is the case with any economic activity, the challenge of guaranteeing the economic and financial sustainability of the newspaper industry is recurrent, and the challenge is redoubled in periods of industry transformation, as has occurred in the media business, where there are various levels of disruption, particularly in terms of the financing model (insufficient traditional sources of revenue: reader revenue and advertiser revenue) and forms of product access and distribution (insufficient physical support and newsstands). The migration to digital media necessarily implies new management strategies and practices in order to optimize costs and diversify the revenues that can be earned by newspaper companies. In this context, this article examines the recent evolution of the financial profitability of the newspaper publishers in Portugal. Financial profitability depends on both the economic profitability and the financial structure (i.e., leverage) of companies. Newspaper companies accumulated very high levels of debt because of the sector crisis. The financial analysis in this article reveals that almost a half of newspaper publishers benefited from positive leverage effects, recording higher financial profitability than economic profitability. Companies that benefited from positive leverage effects were the more leveraged. High leverage was positive for those newspaper companies that made investments whose returns offset their debt costs.

One of the main objectives of science and technology parks (STPs) is to contribute to regional development through the creation of skilled jobs in the territory where they are located. However, despite the expansion of these infrastructures over the last decades and the governmental support they receive, there is very little empirical evidence on how these infrastructures affect the employment growth of the firms located there. The aim of this paper is to examine whether the location in STPs has positive effects on employment growth at the firm level. We analysed a sample of 553 Portuguese firms located on STPs and a control group of the same size of comparable firms located outside STPs, applying a dynamic panel data model methodology. The empirical evidence does not allow to prove that location in STPs has positive effects on employment growth, which raises the need to rethink the policies supporting these parks.

Este traballo trata a evolución económica recente do sector da prensa impresa en Galiza. Alén da crise económica xeral de 2008, o sector sufriu a súa propia crise estrutural provocada pola emerxencia da Internet. Para estudar o impacto desta dobre crise e a resposta das empresas do sector, realizamos unha análise económica-financeira dunha mostra de 13 empresas galegas editoras de xornais en papel durante o período 2008-2018, centrándonos na rendibilidade e nas súas principais compoñentes. Os resultados mostran unha caída da facturación que se prolonga durante todo o período, incluída a fase de crecemento económico, síntoma do declive do papel como soporte xornalístico. Porén, tras unha etapa de crise marcada por rendibilidades negativas, as empresas conseguiron recuperarse grazas a un axuste no volume de activos totais e nos custes operativos máis intenso que a caída experimentada polas vendas, tornando máis pequenas e máis eficientes.

RESUMO O papel dos parques de ciência e tecnologia (PCT) no desenvolvimento econômico, especialmente no crescimento de empresas, tem merecido particular atenção por parte das políticas públicas dos diferentes países. Porém, na literatura não existe consenso sobre se a localização nesses parques tem efeitos positivos no crescimento em vendas das empresas. O objetivo deste artigo é alargar a discussão acerca dos efeitos dos PCT, proporcionando novas evidências empíricas. Para isso, utilizamos uma amostra de 553 firmas portuguesas localizadas nessas infraestruturas e uma amostra de controle de idêntica dimensão. O método de emparelhamento utilizado é o Propensity Score Matching (PSM), e a análise é efetuada com recurso ao método generalizado dos momentos em dados em painel dinâmico. A análise empírica não permite provar qualquer efeito estatisticamente significativo da localização das firmas em PCT sobre o seu crescimento em vendas.

The role of science and technology parks (STPs) in economic development, and in particular in the growth of the firms, has received considerable attention from government policies in different countries. However, there is no consensus in the literature on whether the location in these parks has positive effects on firms’ sales growth. This paper aims to extend the discussion on the effects of STPs by providing new empirical evidence. With this purpose, we use a sample of 553 Portuguese companies located in these infrastructures and a control sample of the same size. We use the Propensity Score Matching Procedure to match the samples and the analysis is carried out by the Generalized Method of Moments in dynamic panel data. The empirical analysis does not prove any statistically significant effect of the location of the firms in science and technology parks on their growth in sales.

Digitalisation led to a structural crisis in the newspaper industry, undermining revenues from both readers and advertisers. Economies of scale play a central role in the newspaper business, but in a context of falling incomes, the major route to take advantage of them is the reduction in the asset size and operating costs. The digital business model can be a way to increase companies’ profitability, as online-only media publishers do not need as many assets and costs as their print counterparts to operate. Digitalisation is particularly interesting for local news outlets, since they operate in small markets and could have difficulties to reach an optimal size. However, there are little empirical evidence on how digital business models influence the profitability of newspapers. Using a sample of 198 and 69 Spanish print and online-only media publishers, respectively, during the period 2008–2018 and applying a dynamic panel data methodology, this article analyses the extent to which the main features defining print vs. digital business models affect firms’ profitability. Empirical evidence reveals a better performance of digital publishers, with lower material costs being the route through which the digital business model benefits from the economies of scale and achieves greater efficiency.

The end of the economic crisis initiated in 2008 was not the end of the newspaper crisis. The shifts introduced by digitalisation are increasingly deeper, and advertising spending on newspapers continued to fall during the economic recovery. To study how the firms adapted to this declining market, this article performs an in-depth financial analysis of 98 Spanish print newspaper publishers over the period 2009–2018, focusing on profitability. The results show very low or even negative returns on assets, but a positive trend in profitability is observed from 2014 onwards, despite the stagnation of advertising spending. Companies reduced their costs to a greater extent than the fall in revenues, improving their profit margins. National newspapers increased total asset turnover via decapitalisations, becoming smaller and more efficient.

La Transición a la democracia supuso una profunda renovación para la fotografía en España, en una época marcada por el auge del documentalismo contemporáneo a nivel internacional. Anna Turbau contribuyó decisivamente con esa renovación durante su etapa en Galicia (1975-1979), abordando nuevas temáticas y desarrollando un estilo singular que combinaría la fotografía directa con la representación de los sentimientos. Este trabajo analiza la obra de Turbau durante este periodo clave, cubriendo el vacío académico existente sobre la autora.

Research on coverage of the economic developments in the run-up to the 2008 crisis concludes that the media did not warn of the risks involved, failing in their watchdog role by not anticipating the crisis. However, a key issue remains unaddressed: what would have happened if the media had warned about the factors of instability that led to the crisis? This article explores some answers to this question, for the 2008 crisis and for economic crises in general. To do this, we perform a joint critical review of the literature on watchdog journalism, on economic crises theories, and on media effects on the economy. More specifically, we consider the media’s influence on financial markets, on macroeconomic dynamics (via conditioning the households’ and firms’ behavior), and on economic policy; discussing, at the theoretical level and supported by the empirical evidence available, the ways each kind of media influence could (or not) prevent a structural economic crisis. If the crisis is interpreted as the consequence of dysfunctions in the economic model, or specific errors by agents, it is logical to think that the media could have helped prevent it, by warning of the dangers and promoting changes in public policies and investment decisions. If, on the other hand, the crisis is understood as a necessary readjustment of capitalism in the face of an exhausted accumulation model, the media’s influence would have been very limited in terms of preventing it.