Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

A cross-sectional study was carried out in order to establish the changes of academic burnout, engagement and mental health in Engineering and Health Sciences students at the beginning and at the end of a semester of study. The participants were 145 students between 16-36 years old of a Colombian public university, evaluated in February 2015 - June 2015 by the Maslach Burnout Inventory Survey to students, Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, Symptom Inventory 90-R. The results indicate increases of exhaustion and cynicism, as well as reduction of dedication and depression during the semester; burnout is more severe in Engineering at the beginning of semester, while the engagement is greater in Health Sciences. It is concluded that there are changes in the rise of exhaustion (exhaustion-cynicism), decrease in engagement (dedication) and mental health, especially regarding the symptoms of depression, in addition to the distinction of burnout-engagement in Engineering and Health Sciences at the beginning of semester.

This is the background paper for the productivity extension of the World Bank’s Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM). Based on an extensive literature review, the paper identifies the main determinants of economic productivity as innovation, education, market efficiency, infrastructure, and institutions. Based on underlying proxies, the paper constructs indexes representing each of the main categories of productivity determinants and, combining them through principal component analysis, obtains an overall determinant index. This is done for every year in the three decades spanning 1985-2015 and for more than 100 countries. In parallel, the paper presents a measure of total factor productivity (TFP), largely obtained from the Penn World Table, and assesses the pattern of productivity growth across regions and income groups over the same sample. The paper then examines the relationship between the measures of TFP and its determinants. The variance of productivity growth is decomposed into the share explained by each of its main determinants, and the relationship between productivity growth and the overall determinant index is identified. The variance decomposition results show that the highest contributor among the determinants to the variance in TFP growth is market efficiency for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries and education for developing countries in the most recent decade. The regression results indicate that, controlling for country- and time-specific effects, TFP growth has a positive and significant relationship with the proposed TFP determinant index and a negative relationship with initial TFP. This relationship is then used to provide a set of simulations on the potential path of TFP growth if certain improvements on TFP determinants are achieved. The paper presents and discusses some of these simulations for groups of countries by geographic region and income level. In addition, as a country-specific illustration, the paper presents simulations on the potential path of TFP growth for Peru under various scenarios. An accompanying Excelbased toolkit, linked to the LTGM, provides a larger set of simulations and scenario analysis at the country level for the next few decades.

We apply synthetic control methods to study the long-term consequences of the interventionist and collectivist reforms implemented by the Peruvian military junta of 1968–1975. We compare long-term outcomes for the Peruvian economy following the radical reforms of the early 1970s with those of two controls made of similar countries, one chosen in the Latin American region and another one chosen from the world at large. We find that the economic legacy of the junta includes sizable loses in GDP along two decades, beyond those that can be attributed to adverse international circumstances. The evidence suggests that those loses can be attributed both to a decline in capital accumulation and to a fall in productivity.

The unsettled discussion continues about the factors behind the increase in the relative wages of skilled workers in developing countries. Using data from Peru for the years 1994 to 2000, we analyze the determinants of within-industry share of skilled workers. We use a translog cost function for gross output and are therefore able to incorporate the effects of materials, both domestic and imported, in addition to capital. We find that capital accumulation can explain a large fraction of the increase in the wage bill share and relative wages of skilled labor. This finding is contrary to the commonly held view that unobservable technological change is responsible for the rising skill premium in both developing and developed economies. A test for separability indicates that a gross output cost function is the appropriate one to use, and therefore share equations based on value-added cost functions could be misspecified.

We study gender differences on cognitive functioning among older adults living in poverty. The data come from the Survey of Health and Wellbeing of the Elderly (ESBAM) which is the baseline survey to evaluate the Peru’s social pension program Pension 65. The results show that females are better off than males regarding episodic memory, but worse off in mental intactness. We do not find gender differences in the overall measure of cognition, but regional differences matter in favour of urban localities. The sizeable associations of education and quality of childhood nutrition with later-life cognition confirm the long-term impacts of early life developments on current outcomes, particularly in the case of females. Therefore, policies aimed at improving early childhood development are expected to have a positive impact in the quality of old-age.

This paper studies the interaction between production subsidies and innovation subsidies. We develop a model which allows us to calculate the socially optimal subsidies (and how they vary with changes in the economic environment), and to understand how firms react to each type of subsidy. In a three-stage game, the government chooses production and innovation subsidies in the first stage to maximize welfare in the presence of a shadow cost of public funds; two firms invest in cost-reducing R&D in the second stage; and the two firms compete in quantities in the last stage. We find that production subsidies crowd out innovation. On the other hand, providing a production subsidy reduces the cost of the innovation subsidy, and vice versa. The optimal production subsidy either increases monotonically with spillovers, or is U-shaped with respect to spillovers, depending on exogenous parameters. The innovation subsidy is increasing in spillovers. The production subsidy is higher for very low spillovers, while the innovation subsidy is higher for moderate/high spillovers. In equilibrium, because of the innovation subsidy, R&D increases with spillovers, and so does welfare. We also consider the case of a financially constrained government, as well as the case of a uniform subsidy to production and innovation costs.

In this paper I present a model to forecast the daily Value at Risk (VaR) of the Peruvian stock market (measured through the general index of the Lima Stock Exchange: the IGBVL) based on intraday (high-frequency) data. Daily volatility is estimated using realised volatility and I adopted a regression quantile approach to calculate one-step predicted VaR values. The results suggest that the realised volatility is a useful measure to explain the Peruvian stock market volatility and I obtained sound results using quantile regression for risk estimation.

In this theoretical note, we propose the GProbit model as an alternative to gravity models to estimate grouped-data flows. This is a model based on the random utility theory, which is consistent with the principle of population behavior. Instead of migrant counts, the dependent variable of the GProbit model of flows consists of a number of observed proportions. It allows explaining the propensity to migrate from any origin to a destination, which is an interesting relative concept not affected by the size effect. For this reason, it is expected to have better fit and less problems of non-normality, as illustrated by an application for the internal migration flows of the Spanish regions.

Do market relative prices reflect real scarcity of resources? If this were so, market prices would provide society with the correct signals about real scarcities. Economics—the science of scarcity— has different answers to this question. Following the principles of current epistemology, the paper reviews three theories of markets: neoclassical, bio-economics, and unified theory, analyzing their assumptions, their derived empirical predictions about the relation between market prices and scarcity, and their validity when confronted against known basic facts. Clarifying misconceptions about the nature and the role of the market mechanism in the functioning of capitalism is the expected contribution of the paper.