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

Public policy evaluation implies adopting an open attitude to methodologies and techniques (quantitative and qualitative). While quantitative techniques answer the question how much, those of a qualitative nature try to find out how and why some interventions work and others do not. The objective of this paper is to evaluate, using qualitative techniques, the governance of Panama’s Red de Oportunidades programme, given that the institutional framework has become a decisive aspect for the success of public policies. Exclusion and inclusion errors in the identification of programme beneficiaries and other deficiencies in governance have been detected, such as the need to stablish protocols more effective in order to guarantee the monitoring of co-responsibilities in education.

In recent years, the development of several posterior simulation techniques has boosted the field of Bayesian econometrics especially in applied works. Prior distribution plays a dominant role in Bayesian analysis; priors are meant to reflect information the researcher has before seeing the data. This research examined the sensitivity of the Gibbs sampler (GS) and Monte Carlo Integration (MCI) methods to three different levels of correlation in prior covariance to know the effects of varying correlation on posterior simulation methods in estimating the parameters in a linear regression model. The three different levels of correlation are; Negative Correlation (NC), Positive Correlation (PC) and Zero correlation (ZC). The results showed that MCI outperformed the GS in most cases and the accuracy of MCI does not depend on the level of correlation either positive or negative while GS performed better when positive level of correlation was used as information in the prior covariance than using negative level of correlation. The use of MCI in Bayesian inference might be of practical importance to practitioners.

Nowadays, the concept of sustainable development is a fundamental pillar and an important challenge for growth and progress for developed countries. For the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), the environmental efficiency can be determined as the set of activities that satisfies the human requirements and that provides quality of life at the same time the environmental impacts are minimized progressively. It is clear that the environmental efficiency is a key variable for the sustainable development, but there is any variable influencing directly this efficiency? In this work it has been found that the technological readiness is an important factor influencing the environmental efficiency. For EU, the environmental efficiency is related to technology so that the technological readiness explains part of environmental efficiency but it is not a determinant factor. This means, a high technological readiness index implies a high efficiency scores but not viceversa. It will be used the Data Envelopment Analysis methodology to obtain the efficiency scores, and the technological readiness index developed by The World Economic Forum. Once the data are obtained, a regression model is applied to further study the relation between both.

We analyze how future costs must be balanced against present costs. This is traditionally done using an exponential function with a constant discount rate. The choice of discount rate can dramatically e_ect the question on what is the value of the future. This is specially critical for environmental problems such as global warming, and it has generated a controversy as to the urgency for immediate action (Stern, 2006; Nordhaus, 2007a,b). We briey review the issue for the nonspecialist and take into account the randomness of the economic evolution by studying the discount function of three widely used processes for the dynamics of interest rates: Ornstein-Uhlenbeck, Feller and log-normal.We also outline our previous empirical survey on 9 stable countries (countries that have not su_ered periods of destabilizing ination) over time spans ranging up to more than 300 years (Farmer et. al. 2014). We estimate the parameters of one of the models studied (the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process) and obtain the long-run discount rate for all these countries. The long-run discount obtained supports the low discounting rate proposed by Stern (2006) over higher rates that have been advocated by others (Nordhaus, 2007a,b)

The objective of this study is to learn some of the determinant factors in the internationalization of tourist services in Andalucía in accordance with the Eclectic Paradigm (OLI) (Dunning, 1977, 1993). The study will focus on Andalusia in Southern Spain. In the Andalusian region there are no official data on internationalized companies. We have therefore conducted a survey of 130 internationalized tourist companies within the region. The results show that the ownership or specific advantages considered by the businesses themselves are the quality of service and the image that customers have of the company, price competitiveness and the professional training of employees. Regarding the advantages of locating abroad that are believed to be most important, those companies that engage in foreign investment highlight customer follow-up and finding new customers. As well, they greatly value those factors related to the destination market: size, and growth.

The objective of this article is to analyse the impact of innovation on the economic results of the Spanish Port Authorities in the period 2008- 2015. The Spanish Port System is composed of 46 ports of general interest organized in 28 Port Authorities, which have been classified into large, medium and small depending on the net business amount. The Industrial Property account, obtained from the Annual Accounts and published in the Official State Gazettes has been used as a proxy variable for innovation. The results show that there is a significant correlation between the investment in Industrial Property, and, therefore, between the effort in innovation and the net business amount of the Port Authorities.

During the last decades the concept of job quality (JQ) and immigrant’s assimilation in the labour market has been highly debated in the social science.This paper aims to contribute to this emerging body of research on subjective job quality indicators as a measure of immigrants’ integration in the French labour market through estimation of the differential between native and migrant workers.Focussing on the gap between native and immigrant workers in the French labour market context, we evaluate job quality with subjective indicators related to the working environment, such as whether or not the job tasks entail health risks, physical strains or other drawbacks.

This study attempts to analyze and identify presence of herd behavior amongst investors, using daily returns of 387 stocks listed on Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2017. It also investigates difference in investor behavior under different market conditions and across different sectors listed on PSX. The study uses CSAD (Cross Sectional Absolute Dispersion) model proposed by (Chang et al., 2000) to test presence of herding behavior in PSX. The results of the study do not support widespread existence of herding in Pakistan Stock Exchange overall whereas sectoral (industry specific) analysis reveal evidence of herding in 4 sectors listed in Pakistan Stock Exchange.

The stochastic and probabilistic techniques play a fundamental role in the mathematical modeling of aspects related to the natural and social sciences. In physics, stochastic models are often used in areas as diverse as climatology, molecular biology, biochemistry, as well as economics. The purpose of this paper is to propose the application to finance of models and processes used in the field of statistical physics, through techniques and results of the stochastic theory of processes and in particular of diffusion processes that, directly emerged and applied in the field of physics are useful in the field of financial economics. In our case, we intend to relate the Fokker-Planck equation to the model proposed by Black and Scholes, since the latter is modeled by a stochastic differential partial equation and similarities can be established with the stochastic and diffusion processes observed in physics.

Most empirical evidence on choices involving dated rewards has found that the discount rate used in intertemporal choices by individuals is not constant, as suggested by Samuelson (1937). In effect, the discount rate can depend on both time (showing decreasing impatience, stationarity or increasing impatience) and amount (showing magnitude effect, separability or magnitude effect reversal). A discount function, able to explain almost all the stages of impatience with respect to time and amount, is the so-called q-exponential discount function deformed by the amount which has been recently incorporated into the ambit of econophysics. The main objective of this manuscript is to apply the ME- index and a new version of the hyperbolic factor to this novel discount function, thus proving its validity. These indexes are our proposal to measure the magnitude and the delay effects, and both have been inspired in the hyperbolic factor introduced by Rohde (2010).