On the stability of value added indicators

This paper shows how relevant concepts in educational effectiveness can support public policy in order to improve the performance of educational systems. Specifically, value-added indicators and the property of their stability over time is addressed with reference to application to school/teacher improvement. Findings of a longitudinal study developed in Portugal concerning primary education in mathematics are presented. Variance component models are fitted in order to obtain those indicators yearly to class-school units. Results of this study reveal that value-added indicators can be a useful instrument for progressive improvement in education, particularly in countries with high rates of student retention and evasion. The novelty of this paper is to measure value added over a single year rather than all stage of schooling that refers to more than 1 year.     

Creative Mediations of the City: Contemporary Public Art as Compass of Metro Manila's Urban Conditions

In this article, public art is proposed as creative agency mobilized to form urban imaginaries. These alternate visions are largely facilitated by artists and art collectives using urban communities as performative grounds. These projects promote a view of art as an effective channel for ‘recentering’ — the identification of a multitude of centers that endlessly fracture and shift, very much resembling the nature of cities themselves. An alternate vision of the city through cartography informed by contrast, temporality and ephemerality is proposed alongside dominant representations of the city. Works by artists Alma Quinto, Mark Salvatus and Wire Tuazon are representative examples of such strategies. Diverse in tactics and platforms, defined by site‐specific mediations, the projects facilitated by these artists reveal the uneven conditions that beset Metro Manila and its outlying areas. Quinto's altered Urban Plan/Duyan is the result of her engagement with women in an informal settler community in San Andres Bukid, Manila, while Salvatus's web‐based Neo‐Urban Planner is an astute observation of the obsessive yet futile ordering of people and space by the state. Tuazon's Amphibian installation is a commentary on the encroachment of multinational interests in local communities. These interventions are foils to state‐ and private‐led urban development schemes. Their strength lies in their direct engagement with the sphere of public dialogue and self‐determination. These artistic practices and strategies are shaped by community interaction, revealing that meanings residing in urban forms are relentlessly negotiated by the numerous actors that inhabit the city.     

Movements of People for Movements of Goods?

Whilst it is well established to think of international tourism as a type of exports, namely ‘home’ exports, the potential of tourism flows as an engine for fostering trade among countries is a poorly studied topic. In this paper, we show that this relationship can be studied at a very detailed level by exploiting the disaggregation of existing information on international trade and inbound tourism. We consider a sample of 25 countries belonging to the European Union, a region that has been interested by common shocks such as the establishment of the euro as the new currency for many countries and the liberalisation in the air transport market. We carry out a panel data analysis by means of which we assess whether international tourist arrivals by a given country activate additional exports towards the same country. We find not only that tourism can promote exports, but also that this effect displays important differences depending on whether or not consumption goods are considered. This finding is consistent with the idea that the experience of tourists in a given destination reduces the fixed costs of trade, thus facilitating access to the advantages of international trade for more peripheral economies.     

Influence of Affective Traits on Entrepreneur's Goals and Satisfaction

Emotions are important to an individual's behavior. However, affective elements have rarely been included in the analysis of entrepreneurs' behavior. Using a sample of 335 entrepreneurs from multiple industries of the Spanish region of Castile and León, we analyze the role of emotions in entrepreneurs' statement of goals and in their satisfaction with business performance. The results show that positive affective traits influence an entrepreneur to state broad and ambitious goals, and personal negative affective traits influence an entrepreneur to state a narrow set of goals. We also find that positive (negative) affective traits are positively (negatively) related to entrepreneur satisfaction.     

Exchange Rate Volatility and Output Volatility: A Theoretical Approach*

This paper makes an attempt to determine the factors influencing exchange rate and exchange rate uncertainty, as well as output and output variability. In the context of a small open economy under flexible exchange rates regime it is found that the level both of exchange rate and output is affected by monetary and inflationary shocks, as well as shocks in government spending, output, and trade balance. Further, the uncertainty of exchange rate and output is associated positively with the uncertainty of all shocks while the contemporaneous occurrence of selected shocks imposes either a positive or negative impact on exchange rate and output volatility. Finally, it is shown that the effect of the determinants either of exchange rate volatility or output volatility is very sensitive to the parameter values.     

Technological specialization in industrial countries: Patterns and dynamics

Technological Specialization in Industrial Countries: Patterns and Dynamics. — This paper employs distribution dynamics and patent data to study the empirical dynamics of technological specialization in industrial countries. Large countries spread innovation activities across a wider range of technologies, and their specialization level in a field displays lower probability to move around its initial level (country size effects). Mobility is high and asymmetric: it is difficult to improve specialization in very disadvantaged technologies, while high comparative advantages revert towards lower specialization levels. These findings undermine the theory of technological accumulation and path dependence, its implication of persistence in trade specialization patterns and the effectiveness of targeted industrial and technology policies.