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The purpose of this study is to assess whether Catalonia’s 2023 Housing Law, aimed at controlling rental prices in high-demand areas like Barcelona, successfully reduced rental prices. By comparing pre- and post-policy trends in Catalonia with those of other Spanish regions, the study seeks to determine the effectiveness of the policy in achieving its stated objectives while accounting for external economic factors.

This study uses a Differences-in-Differences methodology to evaluate the impact of Catalonia’s 2023 Housing Law on rental prices. Catalonia is treated as the experimental group, while other Spanish regions serve as the control. The model accounts for macroeconomic variables such as gross domestic product (GDP) and inflation and uses administrative data on actual rental prices to ensure precision. The approach allows for a robust analysis of whether the rent control policy effectively influenced rental price trends compared to the control regions.

The findings suggest that while rental prices in Catalonia experienced a slight decline following the implementation of the 2023 Housing Law, the reduction was not statistically significant compared to other regions. Macroeconomic factors, particularly GDP growth and housing supply, played a more substantial role in shaping rental price trends than the rent control measure itself.

The analysis is limited by the short post-treatment period (2023 to 2024), which may not fully capture the law’s long-term effects. Future research should extend the timeframe and investigate additional outcomes, such as housing quality, tenant mobility and broader socioeconomic impacts.

The study highlights that rent control measures alone may not be sufficient to reduce rental prices in high-demand areas. Policymakers should integrate rent control with strategies to increase housing supply, such as incentives for new construction and urban planning improvements, to ensure sustained affordability.

Rent control policies may provide short-term relief for tenants but risk being ineffective in the absence of a sufficient housing supply. A comprehensive policy approach is necessary to achieve long-term affordability, particularly for low- and middle-income households in high-demand urban areas.

This paper offers empirical evidence on the limited impact of Catalonia’s 2023 Housing Law, emphasizing the importance of addressing structural issues like housing supply in conjunction with rent control policies. The study contributes to the ongoing debate on housing affordability and provides valuable insights for urban policymakers.

This research was conducted to understand how vulnerable communities used social media (SM) tools to face the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Affected by the lack of information and the absence of effective public policies, residents from slums in the city of Rio de Janeiro displayed new and unexpected uses to SM tools to tackle the health and socio-economic impacts of the pandemic.

The research methodology consisted of a qualitative, exploratory study, combining a series of in-depth interviews with the analysis of various posts, containing videos and texts, extracted from SM during the first six months of the pandemic. The data were collected in the context of 10 different communities in Rio de Janeiro city.

In the context of the pandemic, people combined different uses of SM not only to inform themselves and communicate with others but also to articulate and execute fundraising and food donation strategies within vulnerable communities. Accordingly, this SM use is characterized by improvisation, learning by doing and building resilience, which are all constructs related to the concept of bricolage. Users had no specific SM knowledge, and adjusted these technological tools to emergent new activities in practice, which is characteristic of sociomaterial process. In addition to emphasizing the importance of context for the emergence of the phenomenon, this work also highlights reliability, validity and authority as characteristics related to the citizen-led participation approach that was observed.

Future research can develop approaches based on pandemic sociomaterial bricolage (PSB) aspects, which could guide governments and practitioners on building innovative solutions for the use of SM by the population, especially in emergency situations.

This study proposes a framework, termed PSB, to represent SM usage promoted by the pandemic context, which emerged from the triangulation of empirical data and an analysis based on the concepts of bricolage and sociomateriality.

This study aimed at analyzing the factors that induce the intention of contribution by participants in crowdsourcing initiatives.

This study is an explanatory investigation using a quantitative approach. In the second stage, an exploratory study was carried out. Data were obtained through online questionnaires available to the contributors of two platforms, and results were obtained from a regression analysis.

The results revealed a greater importance given by participants to intrinsic motivational factors (learning, fun and satisfaction) compared with the extrinsic motivational factor (acknowledgment). Monetary rewards proved irrelevant in this process, whereas attitude and self-efficacy proved good predictors of the intention of contribution in crowdsourcing initiatives.

No study, as far as the authors’ knowledge extends, has been undertaken to understand what motivations are more relevant in the context of crowdsourcing platforms using multiple theories.

The economic realignment in Latin America has created two clusters, one stagnant in the north and the other growth-bound in the south. This study aims to focus on Brazil, the key player in the growth-bound southern cluster, and address three fundamental questions: how Brazilian executives in four B2B sectors (telecommunications, business equipment, steel, and transportation) viewed the internal competitive developments, how they strategically responded to these developments, and what were the marketing and financial outcomes of these strategies.

Data were obtained by interviewing top decision makers such as president, chief executive officer, and director of the companies.

Findings show that the intensity of competitive pressures due to globalization varied by sector and so did strategic responses of firms. Marketing and financial performance outcomes also varied by sectors.

The study adds to the growing literature on competitive market developments, strategic responses and performance outcomes of firms in Brazil, an important emerging economy and the key player in the southern Latin America cluster.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the perceived implications of economic and monetary union (EMU) as a driver for changes in the hotel business environment and, consequently, on Portuguese competitiveness, in terms of the conceptual framework and methodology adopted and showing the way how it may contribute to help managers and decision makers to effectively manage their competitive strategies.

The paper adopted and adapted Porter's models (Diamond, Five Forces and Value Chain) as the basis for analysing the implications of EMU upon the hotel business environment (at national, industry and operational level). Those implications are the ones perceived by the stakeholders in that sector: public authorities, trade associations and hoteliers.

The findings indicated that EMU not only changed the hotel business environment at a national level, but also changed the competitive and operational environment. Nonetheless, as this study found, the hotel stakeholders had relatively different hopes and fears concerning EMU.

The paper offers a conceptual framework sufficiently versatile (regarding the context of the study) which can be used by decision makers or managers as a tool to understand their business environment and, consequently, to cope with potential challenges.

Two of the innovative features of this study are: the triangulation of perspectives on the implications of EMU on hotels and the use of a combination of Porter's models as a suitable tool for studying the implications of EMU in the services sector. This can be useful to service decision makers and managers that seek to cope with the business environment challenges.

This study examines the effects of firm-level collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) on workers’ welfare within Spanish firms, focusing on the trade-off between wage inequality and mean wage levels within firms. Results indicate that while firm-level CBAs contribute to increased intra-firm wage inequality, they also significantly enhance intra-firm average wage levels, with these positive effects being consistently observed across firm types and employee skill levels. Most notably, the increase in mean wages tends to offset the adverse effects associated with wage disparities, thereby leading to an overall improvement in workers’ welfare within firms. These findings provide crucial policy implications, advocating for tailored approaches in supporting effective collective bargaining practices that can foster equitable wage growth and enhance workers’ welfare, particularly in smaller firms and those employing low-skilled workers. Our results underscore the importance of firm-level negotiations in shaping equitable and prosperous labour market outcomes in contemporary economic settings.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the forecast of tourism inflows into Spain by use of Google – indices on internet searches measuring the relative popularity of keywords associated with travelling to Spain.

Two models are estimated for each of the three countries with the largest tourist flows into Spain (Germany, UK and France): a conventional model, the best ARIMA model estimated by TRAMO (model 0) and a model augmented with the Google-index relating to searches made from each country (model 1). The overall performance of both models is compared.

The improvement in forecasting provided by the short-term models that include the G-indicator is quite substantial up to 2012, reducing out of sample mean square errors by 42 per cent, although their performance worsens in the following years.

Deeper study and conceptualization of sources of error in Google trends and data quality is necessary.

The paper illustrates that while this new tool can be a powerful instrument for policy makers as a valuable and timely complement for traditional statistics, further research and better access to data is needed to better understand how internet consumers’ search activities translate (or not) into actual economic outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the structure‐conduct‐performance theory and the strategic fit concept to examine the effects of globalization on markets, strategies, and performance of business‐to‐consumer firms in Brazil.

The paper takes a qualitative approach to answer the research questions. Top decision makers such as president, chief executive officer, chairman of the board, vice president, and director of the companies were interviewed. The elite approach to in‐depth interviewing was followed to obtain reliable information from the decision makers.

Findings indicate that globalization and especially the entry of Chinese firms significantly changed market contexts in Brazil. Brazilian executives responded to changes in market contexts by shifting from production to customer orientation, building brand equity, developing new products, and differentiating offerings. Overall, marketing performance of Brazilian firms was positive, but profitability suffered.

The study contributes to the literature by showing that globalization has changed market contexts in Brazil by developing a new form of competition in which firms from emerging economies are now competing against each other. Findings from this study can provide useful theoretical and strategic insights into the behavior and performance of firms in other emerging markets.