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Standardized tests intend to reduce information asymmetry by providing a common and objective measure of students' academic performance. The basic assumption underlying standardized testing is that differences in student performance on standardized tests should be attributed primarily to differences in the quality of education received by students. However, there is evidence that environmental factors can affect standardized test scores, which may result in anomalous observations or outliers that show a distortion of student performance. In this regard, the exclusion of Spain from PISA 2018 is particularly interesting as Spanish data met PISA 2018 Technical Standards but showed implausible student-response behavior. The aim of this paper is to complement the OECD's analysis of Spain's exclusion from PISA 2018 by exploring the potential reasons behind the outlier results, focusing on the Madrid region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical study delves into the intricate factors that shape firms' choices regarding the adoption of robots within the Spanish context. Using a dataset encompassing a diverse set of industries, we employ an empirical analysis to uncover the determinants of robot adoption and investigate the associated outcomes on market variables. Our findings reveal several key factors that significantly influence a firm's likelihood of adopting robots. We find that firm profitability, exporter status, the control variables including share of R&D, and capital intensity exhibit strong positive relationships with robot adoption. Conversely, the impact of the level of human capital on adoption decisions is less pronounced. Furthermore, our study explores the impact of robot adoption on firm performance. We observe that firms embracing robotisation experience notable improvements in the output, exporting activities, and reduction in labour cost share. This study incorporates a gradient boosting‐based machine‐learning model, specifically XGBoost, along with instrumental variable regression models, to conduct rigorous robustness analyses and validate the obtained results. These findings contribute to the understanding of the dynamics and implications of robot adoption in the manufacturing sector, explaining the factors that drive firms' decisions and the subsequent market effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect on academic performance of an exogenous educational reform that reduced the school calendar of non-fee-paying schools in the Madrid region (Spain) by approximately two weeks, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged. To identify the consequences of such a measure, we exploit the fact that it did not affect private schools (control group) and the existence of an external cognitive test that measures academic performance before and after its application in the region. We find that the reform worsened students' educational outcomes by around 0.13 of a standard deviation. This effect was especially strong in the subjects of Spanish and Mathematics. We further explored quantile effects across the distribution of exam scores, finding that the disruption had a more negative effect on students in the upper quartile than those in the lower quartile. Overall, the analysis shows a reduction in the gap across non-fee-paying schools and an increase in the gap between non-fee- and fee-paying schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates homogeneity in the transposition of European Directives using as an example the EU policy on tobaccos regulated by Directive 2011/64. We analyse the effect of excise duties on tobacco consumption in Europe from 2002 to 2017 using an Artificial Intelligence counterfactual strategy. To our knowledge, this the first time that this AI strategie has been used in the economic analysis of law. Our results show that countries have different responses to changes in prices or taxation on tobacco. The lack of homogeneity across countries creates distortions and frontier effects and shows the need of harmonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether the efficiency gains accompanying fiscal decentralization generate higher growth in more decentralized economies, applying pooled-mean group techniques to a panel dataset of 23 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, 1972-2005. We find that spending decentralization has tended to be associated with lower economic growth while revenue decentralization has been associated with higher growth. Since OECD countries are substantially more spending than revenue decentralized, this is consistent with Oates' (1972) hypothesis that maximum efficiency gains require a close match between spending and revenue decentralization. It suggests reducing expenditure decentralization, and simultaneously increasing the fraction financed locally, would be growth-enhancing. (JEL E62, H71, H72), I. INTRODUCTION Fiscal decentralization (hereafter: FD) is a political economy trend in both developing and developed countries. According to the World Bank (1999), some 95% of democracies now have elected [...]

Globalization and growth-maximizing governments may cause countries to converge toward a similar composition of government expenditures. These convergent forces may be even more intensive in the case of EU member states engaged in the European integration process. The results obtained, through calculation of a constructed dissimilarity index and by adapting the usual indicators of convergence (β, σ, and γ), reveal that there has been a harmonization process. In addition, this approximation of the structures of government expenditures has been greater in the EU than in the non-EU countries of the OECD. Nevertheless, EU member states are converging toward a different steady-state composition of government expenditures. (JEL H11, H50, H60), I. INTRODUCTION The globalization process has led to a growing interdependence of fiscal policies affecting, inter alia, the composition of government expenditures. Sanz and Velazquez (2004) show that there was [...]

Research question:Several studies report modelling relating countries’ medal shares at the Olympics to population and per capita income (host status and political system are typically included as controls). This paper uses a similar model but disaggregates to the level of the individual sport to ask questions such as whether some sports have a less steep relationship with income levels than others and whether hosting effects are more pronounced in some sports than others.Research methods:Employing a random effects tobit model, data on medal shares are modelled across 15 sports at six editions of the Games (1992–2012). Marginal effects, calculated for the case of cycling, illustrate how far many poor countries are from reasonable expectation of achieving medals.Results and findings:Income is influential on outcomes in all sports, its effects most pronounced in sports with substantial requirements for specific capital equipment; the distribution of medals is less unequal in sports practised in multi-sports venues. Gains from hosting vary in magnitude, performance tending to be elevated most in sports with outcomes strongly influenced by judges.Implications:For poorer countries, the paper identifies a small group of sports on which it would be most realistic to focus resources. For Games organisers, who must decide which sports to include, it provides information relevant to the goal of spreading success more evenly across countries. For example, proposals to exclude wrestling are shown to have been potentially harmful to medal prospects of poorer countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the long-run GDP impacts of changes in total government expenditure and in the shares of different spending categories for a sample of OECD countries since the 1970s, taking account of methods of financing expenditure changes and possible endogenous relationships. We provide more systematic empirical evidence than available hitherto for OECD countries, obtaining strong evidence that reallocating total spending towards infrastructure and education is positive for long-run output levels. Reallocating spending towards social welfare (and away from all other expenditure categories pro-rata) may be associated with modest negative effects on output in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An approach for a query-by-sketch system on qualitative shape information for image retrieval in databases is proposed and evaluated. The use of qualitative methods for shape description allows the gathering of semantic information from the sketches. The qualitative description and recognition of sketches are evaluated in order to verify that it is possible to use the proposed qualitative method for the development of a learning application for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper presents new evidence on the differences in quality and achievement of public, private, and charter schools by using the educational outcomes for the more than 1,200 schools of the Madrid region over the period 2005-2009. By applying an external test including three different areas, mathematics, writing, and language, the evolution of the achievement of the pupils in the three different types of schools, public, charter, and private, are analyzed. Our results show that charter and, especially, private schools attain better results than public schools and are more responsive to its academic evolution, both at a lower cost. Private schools do their best to converge to the leading schools in their district in the previous year, whereas public schools do not seem to do so. This result holds even after controlling for the number of immigrants in the school, the age of the school, and its size. Also, the results seem quite robust, since we tested the relevance of different variables such as immigration, socioeconomic status, and foreign students and we obtained results that support our main hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The today's public database infrastructure spans a very large collection of heterogeneous biological data, opening new opportunities for molecular biology, bio-medical and bioinformatics research, but raising also new problems for their integration and computational processing. Results: In this paper we survey the most interesting and novel approaches for the representation, integration and management of different kinds of biological data by exploiting XML and the related recommendations and approaches. Moreover, we present new and interesting cutting edge approaches for the appropriate management of heterogeneous biological data represented through XML. Conclusion: XML has succeeded in the integration of heterogeneous biomolecular information, and has established itself as the syntactic glue for biological data sources. Nevertheless, a large variety of XML-based data formats have been proposed, thus resulting in a difficult effective integration of bioinformatics data schemes. The adoption of a few semantic-rich standard formats is urgent to achieve a seamless integration of the current biological resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are individuals' attitudes towards globalization consistent with the predictions of the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) theory? Using newly available data from the Flash Eurobarometer 151b of the European Commission, we find that globalization preferences are significantly and robustly correlated with an individual's relative level of human capital, consistent with the HO theory. The impact of skill on globalization preferences is positive in skill-abundant EU countries and strongly negative in EU countries that are well-endowed with low-skill labour. This study is the first to find a robust and significant negative association between skill and support to globalization in low-skill-abundant countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]