Suchergebnisse

ObjectiveThe predictive power of expert knowledge and econometric modeling is analyzed using predictions of results at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games.MethodForecasts by five sport experts and three sport‐agnostic economists are compared at the country level by medal color and by sport. Success ratios and correlation coefficients are used to make these comparisons.ResultsExperts beat economists, although both indicators are always above 75 percent at the country level and 60 percent at the medal‐color and sport levels. Indicators are below 40 percent when predicting individual winners and 20 percent when predicting athlete and medal color.ConclusionsExpert predictions can help bettors. Econometric models can help design long‐term sport policies.

SummaryThis 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.

AbstractThe growing number of immigrants in the Madrid region raises several questions concerning the welfare of future native generations. The debates shift from increasing concern about the congestion of public services like education or healthcare, to how immigration helps to ease tension in relation to financing those services and other benefits to the region's general welfare. In order to evaluate the global effect, our analysis uses a generational accounting method which is applied to different productivity, interest rate and growth scenarios. The results show that the impact of immigrants is positive, with intergenerational distribution towards the currently most active taxpayers.