According to the results, labor societies show a significant pro-cyclical behaviour, both in the creation and in the extinction of firms. This behaviour is transferred with less strongly, to the creation or destruction of employment. Meanwhile, cooperatives evolve quite decoupled to the economic activity. The creation and destruction of cooperatives and their employment reach a low level of synchronization with the business cycle.

El objetivo de este trabajo es estudiar cómo la crisis de 2008 afectó a la demografía empresarial de las cooperativas y comparar su situación con la de los años anteriores y posteriores a la misma. Para ello se acota el período de crisis y se define un período pre-crisis y uno post-crisis. El estudio avanza a través de tres campos de análisis como son la dinámica empresarial, el componente estructural y el ámbito territorial. La dinámica empresarial se estudia a través de la evolución de las tasas de entrada, salida y supervivencia. El componente estructural presenta los efectos de la crisis distinguiendo por tamaño y por clase de cooperativa. Por último, en el ámbito territorial se aplica la técnica de análisis regional Shift-Share para identificar y descomponer el crecimiento del empleo cooperativo entre el efecto regional y el efecto sectorial. Entre los resultados obtenidos destacamos los siguientes. Primero, la crisis incrementó el comportamiento pro-cíclico de las cooperativas. Segundo, fueron las medianas y grandes cooperativas las que mostraron mayor resistencia al tiempo que la antigüedad fue un garante de supervivencia pero no de preservación de empleo. Tercero, se produjo un proceso de creación de cooperativas y/o de incremento de su empleo ligado a la cobertura de necesidades y servicios de forma conjunta. Cuarto, en términos sectoriales las cifras señalan al sector industrial y al de la construcción como los más afectados por la crisis. Por último y en comparación con los años anteriores a la crisis, se detectan cambios importantes en las CCAA que presentaban ventajas de localización para las cooperativas.

Universities have become a strategic element in the innovation process. Knowledgebased innovation makes them key players for the economic and social development of their environment. This article discusses how the University of Lleida interacts in the Agri-food Science and Technology Park of Lleida. It establishes whether a behavioural pattern exists in the cooperation between the companies and institutions of the park and emphasizes the role of the university as an intermediary between scientific knowledge and the market.

This paper examines how exporting cooperatives evolve and differ from those that are focused on the domestic market. We use a Spanish firm-level panel data set spanning 26 years (1991–2016). We work with a wide set of variables that reflect cooperatives’ performance: sales, gross operating margin, productivity, wages, employment, capital intensity, skilled-labour intensity and R&D effort. The analysis deals with two working hypotheses: (i) Exporting cooperatives perform better than non-exporters, (ii) exporting boosts performance growth. With regard to the first one, we provide evidence that exporting cooperatives outperform those that are focused on the domestic market. Cooperatives that export are more productive, larger and pay higher wages than non-exporters. In addition, they are more capital- and skilled-labour intensive. The second hypothesis does not find such conclusive results. Only employment and skilled-labour intensity of exporters show significant faster performance growth than non-exporters. Results can lend weak support to the fact that exporting boosts performance growth.

In this paper, we analyse the interaction between immigrants' employment in cooperatives and the business cycle. The study is centred on the Spanish economy during the period 2003-2015. The main goal of this paper is to answer the following two key questions: are fluctuations in immigrants' employment in cooperatives cyclical in relation to the business cycle? And, are immigrant employees more vulnerable to the business cycle than native employees? The cycles and their turning points are identified using the Bry and Boschan (1971) algorithm. To resolve it we employ the BUSY software, developed by the European Commission. The procedure allows us to identify the features of the cycle phases and to calculate the synchronization index. The results show that (1) employment in cooperatives is procyclical and with no differences between immigrant and native workers, (2) the economic crisis has hit immigrant workers harder than native ones, (3) the immigrants' birthplace is significant because some cyclical behaviour can be found to vary according to the immigrants' origins, however in general, sensitivity to the business cycle is the common factor.