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This article presents an analysis of the state of the art on the relationship between tourism, sustainability and competitiveness (TSC); moreover, the analysis also includes a focus on tourism destination (TSCD). To that end, information on the publications in these fields from recent years was sourced from the Web of Science database. In addition, the VOSviewer software program was used to enable a more in-depth bibliometric study, allowing the results to be clustered by authors, institutions, countries, and journals. The study carried out revealed that 808 articles have been published on aspects relating to TCS and 409 regarding TSCD. The results obtained underscore the greater scientific output on aspects related to sustainability than on aspects related to competitiveness and also that there has been a significant and exponential increase in both cases in recent years. These three fields of study (tourism, sustainability and competitiveness) are rarely combined in the literature, highlighting the lack of a comprehensive overview of this trinity. The evidence reported here suggest that the trend identified represents a future line of work for the coming years.

This paper presents a model of transport cost determinants that corrects the specification problems observed in the transport cost equations in previous literature. The model includes freight transport supply and demand, as well as infrastructure quality and non-time-varying fixed effects related to the route, the exporting company, its strategy and the product. In addition, when defining the origin-destination routes, the model more appropriately accounts for economies of network and economies of scale. In order to build the database, 583 personal interviews were conducted over the course of 2011 with producing companies that ship goods and with the logistics operators. As a result, 305 routes between the Valencian Community and Europe were identified, from which 6390 observations were obtained. The results show that distance is a determining factor in the cost of transport, notwithstanding the infrastructure coverage and improvements in quality. At the same time, the analysis confirms that transport cost is more sensitive to the degree of competition on the route, the volume of freight on the route and the volume of goods shipped on the route by the exporting company, the configuration of the supply chain, the company strategy and the coverage and quality of transport infrastructure.

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This study explores the role of taxes in explaining companies' financing decisions. We test whether the corporate tax shields explanation of capital structure is applicable to firms listed on the Spanish stock exchange over the period [2007][2008][2009][2010][2011][2012][2013]. Taxes are found to be economically and statistically significant determinants of capital structure. Our results suggest that marginal tax rates affect the debt policies of Spanish listed companies, and the existence of non-debt tax shields constitutes an alternative to the use of debt as a tax shelter. Consistent with theoretical expectations, there is a stronger relation between debt and taxation in less levered firms. Finally, we empirically estimate the impact of the new thin-capitalization rule put forth by the Spanish government in 2012 on the financing behaviour of Spanish listed companies.Francisco Sogorb-Mira gratefully acknowledges financial support from Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Research Grant ECO2015-67035P. The authors wish to thank the Co-Editor, Manuel Bagues, and two anonymous referees of Journal of the Spanish Economic Association (SERIEs) for insightful suggestions and advices that substantially improved this paper in many ways. We are also grateful to Juan Ayuso from Banco de España and Domingo García from Bolsas y Mercados Españoles for their help in providing some economic and financial data. Finally, we would also like to thank Pankaj Sinha, Antonio Ruiz-López, Juan A. Sanchis-Llopis, Juan M. Villa-Lora, Anna Toldrá-Simats (discussant) and the participants at the XXII Finance Forum at University of Zaragoza in 2014 and the Research Seminar at University of Valencia in 2015 for helpful discussions and useful comments on previous drafts of this paper. Any errors are our sole responsibility. Our empirical evidence supports the existence of a tax reform effect, where companies affected by interest deductibility limitations reduce their leverage more than companies that are not affected.