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

University institutions face challenges of competitiveness derived from the demands of society, changes in student preferences, and technological evolution; this raises the need to generate objective tools for decision-making to identify the institutions that are effectively contributing to the training of high-level professionals. In this research, a methodology is developed under the Six Sigma approach to measuring the performance of the educational system. Now, to evaluate the methodology, data from the Colombian test for the evaluation of quality in higher education in the area of engineering are used. The results show that the sigma level of the Colombian education system is at Z= 2.17 and a performance Y= 75%, which according to the criteria established in the research is considered an acceptable level. As a significant contribution of the study, a structure for the evaluation, monitoring, and improvement of university education using the Six Sigma approach is presented. The proposed structure is replicable and reproducible to any educational environment where standardized tests are implemented

The development of a model that allows measuring the productivity of a technology-based company is presented, which is based on the interactions identified between the investment of the research department, computer fraud, and theft. These interactions are presented through a model of fuzzy variables in which the membership functions are developed for each of these. Likewise, the interaction rules are developed based on the conjunction of the fuzzy sets proposed for the Mamdani model. With these designs, it is possible to determine the degree of productivity, characterized by a fuzzy set. To test the model, Monte Carlo simulation was used with four scenarios. The simulations’ series results show that the fuzzy sets described allow to measure company’s productivity being analysed through the proposed fuzzy sets productivity ranges.

Exports are a determining variable of the national product so the objective is to perform quantitative estimations, first taking them in an aggregate manner, then by group of products and finally by the main destination market, considering here the four main ones constituted by the US, Chile, Peru and Colombia. Then, the elasticities are found by co-integration models ARDL and VECM, while for the cases of absence of a common stochastic trend the short-term coefficients are obtained through VAR models. At the end, short and long-term ARDL estimates are also made with variables that present a different order of integration, according to the methodology of Pesaran, Shin and Smith (2001), based on the bounds testing approach. The main findings show that in the short term most coefficients are not significant. On the contrary, in the long-term foreign income and the price index are always significant except for Peru. The variables of real exchange rate and volatility are significant only in certain regressions depending on the model considered, although sometimes with unexpected signs. Finally, the regression involving Colombia is totally inconclusive.

This article analyzes the role of structural equation modeling in the field of management science. The approach by which the use of the technique is incorporated into the field of management, additionally, a comparison is generated between the different algorithms and statistical packages available for the application of the technique. Finding in closed source, LISREL, EQS, AMOS, SmartPLS, Mplus, CALIS (in SAS), SEPATH (in Statistica), RAMONA in (Systat), SEM (Stata), Matlab, Semopy (in Python) and in open source, Scilab, Julia, R: lavaan, sem, lava, OpenMx, Strum. Identifying current trends and future approaches that embody the multivariate analysis technique within the management sciences. Finding suggested software for the area of management sciences, as well as mixing trends in the technique, such as the use of neural networks that is beginning to be incorporated as an alternative or complement to the SEM technique.

The aim of this paper is calculating the impact of taxes on inequality of lifetime income distribution in Argentina. Unlike other previous studies on the matter, which performed calculations on annual incidence or approximations on the measurement of lifetime income through current consumption expenditure, the approach to lifetime income measurement will be pursued through measuring income on the sources side. Compared to current income analysis, tax system turns out to be less regressive, given that the less progressivity of direct taxes which is more than compensated by the less regressivity of indirect taxes.

In this paper, the objective is to determine whether international trade operations, cleared by maritime customs in Mexico, present fractal characteristics with long term memory. To estimate the Hurst exponent (H), the scaled rank method (R/S) was applied to 1,700 data grouped by each customs office in the country, considering as a hypotheses that long-term memory is present when H is equal or greater than 0.5 and less than or equal to 1. The results allow affirming that long-term memory does exist, with which the authorities could manage more efficiently the resources assigned to the country's maritime customs offices.

The comparison of surveys presents recurring methodological problems, among which the following stand out particularly: i) the difficulties associated with the change of the questions, either due to the addition of new ones, changing in the mode that are asked, or the elimination of others; ii) the own difficulties selecting the variables to be compared; iii) the need for recoding between mismatched surveys, and iv) the different measurement scales of the variables. Thus, in order to carry on research in quantitative methods, procedures are required to allow for the factorial structure, to compare variables, and to recode the measurement and the scale, all of them in different periods. To evaluate the extent to which the factorial structure is maintained, this work proposes measures of goodness of fit, attached to the confirmatory factorial analysis, where we can find also an original interpretation of the parsimony principle with the RMSEA, FIT and BIC, through the well-known elbow rule in the scree plot. The methodological proposal is validated through two publications, from different years, of the Sociological Research Center (CIS, by its Spanish acronym) and focused on the phenomenon of fiscal fraud.

The objective of the research is to identify the variables that affect short-term financial decisions, determinants of cash flow in MSMEs. A mixed investigation is carried out, based on a survey applied to 278 managers of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in Colombia. The data were analysis based on binary logistic regression and information was managed through executions, oriented to the management of multipurpose events, where training, informal discussion as a focus group and observation of participants' reactions to intentionality and significance of the project are the essence. The results show that financial decisions in the MSMEs are headed by the directors who should wield their leadership, experience, knowledge and skills in financial and strategic training to make decisions aimed at optimizing cash flow even without training. optimal required. A circumstance that to a large extent, especially in micro, small and medium sized companies, new in the market, leads them to finance their activity with their own resources, family resources or informal credit while very few opt for external financing. Operational financial decisions become a complex, empirical, carefree and improvised process for many MSMEs, this being an attenuating factor of the lack of sustainability in the market and in a wide margin of failure.

The abundance of oil resources and the dependence of the state budget on crude oil exports have exposed Iran's single-product economy to oil price fluctuations and its consequences. On the other hand, according to the country's financial system and its being bank-centric, one of the sectors that are constantly affected by oil price fluctuations is the banking system and its performance. To this end, the present study investigated the impact of oil price fluctuations on lending power of specialized banks in Iran using seasonal data from 1999 to 2018 using by Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The results of this study indicate that during the period under review, oil price fluctuations has been a negative and significant effect (coefficient of -0.01) on the credit growth of specialized banks. In addition, GDP growth and inflation have been, respectively, a positive and negative effect (coefficients of 0.09 and -0.09) on the lending power of specialized banks during the period under review.

Roll rates and net flow rates can be seen as the evolution of ageing of accounts receivable and Markov chains. They are accepted methodologies to model the behavior of non-performing consumer loans by buckets and to predict losses, but we find that quite often they are wrongly used as interchangeable concepts, although roll rates track individual accounts across buckets in consecutive months and net flow rates just compare consecutive buckets in consecutive months. We determine their matrices of transition probabilities and analyze them in both stationary and steady-state conditions. Net flow rates have many advantages over roll rates, but a quite important finding for financial institutions and supervisors is that historical flow rates are not conservative for forecasting: when the level of new delinquencies soars, contemporary flow rates will tend to be lower than they would be in steady-state conditions, creating a feeling of false confidence and leading to the underestimation of future losses.