The economic consequences of the spanish Reconquest: The long-term effects of medieval conquest and colonization

This paper shows that a historical process that ended more than five centuries ago, the Reconquest, is very important to explain Spanish regional economic development down to the present day. An indicator measuring the rate of Reconquest reveals a heavily negative effect on current income differences across the Spanish provinces. A main intervening factor in the impact the Reconquest has had is the concentration of economic and political power in a few hands, excluding large segments of the population from access to economic opportunities when Spain entered the industrialization phase. The timing of the effect is consistent with this argument. A general implication of our analysis is that large frontier expansions may favor a political equilibrium among the colonizing agents that is biased toward the elite, creating the conditions for an inegalitarian society, with negative consequences for long-term economic developmenTUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Formación crítica de documentalistas en medios de comunicación

Se centra el antiguo mito de la objetividad del discurso periodístico en la acción de uno de los actores más relevantes y desapercibidos de su proceso de construcción: el documentalista de medios de comunicación. Siendo un hecho la presencia subjetiva del documentalista en sus producciones, se opta por el reconocimiento y la explicitación de la misma mediante dos actuaciones: por un lado la revisión de las estrategias formativas de los documentalistas de medios en centros superiores públicos de modo que combinen la capacitación técnica con la capacitación crítica. Para ello se analizan las materias presentes en los planes de estudios responsables de su formación y se detectan los déficits localizados en función del objetivo buscado. Por otro, se proponen líneas de formación alternativa que puedan orientar a la incorporación transversal de la capacitación crítica de los documentalistas de medios en tales programas.This study takes the old myth of objectivity in media discourse to one of the most important but unrecognized actors in the process of its construction: the mass media information scientist or documentalist. Accepting the subjective presence of the documentalist in his/her productions, this article opts for the recognition and explicit statement of this role, recommending two actions. First, we suggest that public higher education institutions combine the technical training of mass media documentalists with training in critical thinking skills. Our study analysed the subjects covered in course syllabi to detect the deficiencies to be addressed in meeting this objective. Second, we propose alternative lines of training that can contribute to cross-training of mass media documentalists in those degree programs to ensure that they acquire the needed skills in critical analysi

The consequences of persistent inequality on social capital : a municipal-level analysis of blood donation data

Financial support by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness through grant ECO2012-35430 is gratefully acknowledged.This letter advances the hypothesis that persistent inequality affects cultural traits and undermines social capital. We use blood donation data at the local level in Southern Spain to document that, indeed, persistent inequality –as measured by land inequality– negatively affects blood donation, which indicates that it harms social capital. This evidence sheds new light into the debates on the consequences of inequality and the determinants of culture.PostprintPeer reviewe

Thermodynamics of anisotropic branes

We study the thermodynamics of flavor D7-branes embedded in an anisotropic black brane solution of type IIB supergravity. The flavor branes undergo a phase transition between a `Minkowski embedding', in which they lie outside of the horizon, and a `black hole embedding', in which they fall into the horizon. This transition depends on the black hole temperature, its degree of anisotropy, and the mass of the flavor degrees of freedom. It happens either at a critical temperature or at a critical anisotropy. A general lesson we learn from this analysis is that the anisotropy, in this particular realization, induces similar effects as the temperature. In particular, increasing the anisotropy bends the branes more and more into the horizon. Moreover, we observe that the transition becomes smoother for higher anisotropies

Complexity of Magnetization and Magnetic Simplification

We use the Complexity=Volume (CV) prescription to study the effect of a magnetic field on the complexity of formation for states in the gauge theories dual to two different gravitational models. In one of these theories the complexity increases with the intensity of the magnetic field, while in the other a more interesting behavior is discovered, resulting in a phenomenon that we term magnetic simplification. The relevant difference between the two theories is that the content of the second includes a scalar operator with a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value. This leads us to conclude that the direct impact of the magnetic field is to increase the complexity of formation of a state, but it can indirectly lower it by diminishing the complexity associated to additional degrees of freedom when these do not vanish across the space. We additionally compare the results obtained working in the full ten dimensional backgrounds and in their effective five dimensional truncations, exhibiting that the question is still current about which surface, whether the uplift of the 5D extremal hypersurface or the extremal surface in 10D, should be used in the CV prescription.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figure

Chaos, Diffusivity, and Spreading of Entanglement in Magnetic Branes, and the Strengthening of the Internal Interaction

We use holographic methods to study several chaotic properties of a super Yang-Mills theory at temperature $T$ in the presence of a background magnetic field of constant strength $\mathcal{B}$. The field theory we work on has a renormalization flow between a fixed point in the ultraviolet and another in the infrared, occurring in such a way that the energy at which the crossover takes place is a monotonically increasing function of the dimensionless ratio $\mathcal{B}/T^2$. By considering shock waves in the bulk of the dual gravitational theory, and varying $\mathcal{B}/T^2$, we study how several chaos-related properties of the system behave while the theory they live in follows the renormalization flow. In particular, we show that the entanglement and butterfly velocities generically increase in the infrared theory, violating the previously suggested upper bounds but never surpassing the speed of light. We also investigate the recent proposal relating the butterfly velocity with diffusion coefficients. We find that electric diffusion constants respect the lower bound proposed by Blake. All our results seam to consistently indicate that the global effect of the magnetic field is to strengthen the internal interaction of the system.Comment: 49 pages, 17 figure