Browse by: "2010"

Structural changes and budget constraints are challenging German higher education institutions to change their management practices. This exploratory analysis discusses how institutions are increasing their collaborative efforts – and are doing so in a more structured way – with heterogeneous partners from science, industry and society. Their aim is to diversify their financial base, increase their global reach and excellence, bring into play synergies in regional settings, finance student demand and build joint educational products.

The impact of the financial crisis on higher education has been considerable, and its effects are continuing. These effects can be discerned in a number of ways; but whereas both developed and developing countries are affected, they can be affected differently. A modifying factor is the shape and structure of the higher education system within each country. This paper looks at developed and developing countries and considers key areas of higher education affected by the financial crisis and possible ways forward.

This paper sets out to analyse the need for better “transparency tools” which inform university stakeholders about the quality of universities. First, we give an overview of what we understand by the concept of transparency tools and those that are currently available. We then critique current transparency tools’ methodologies, looking in detail at the question of data sources, the risks involved in constructing league tables and the challenges in using composite indicators. Lastly, we argue in favour of developing a new principle for transparency tools: that of multidimensional ranking.

This paper assesses recent patterns of intergenerational social mobility across OECD countries and examines the role that public policies can play. It shows that the relationship between parental or socio-economic background and offspring educational and wage outcomes is positive and significant in practically all countries for which evidence is available. Intergenerational social mobility is measured by several different indicators, since no single indicator provides a complete picture. However, one pattern that emerges is of a group of countries, southern European countries and Luxembourg, which appears to rank as relatively immobile on most indicators, while another group, the Nordic countries, is found to be more mobile. Furthermore, public policies such as education and early childcare play a role in explaining observed differences in intergenerational social mobility across countries.

The aim of this paper is to assess whether the use of ICT has an impact on student performances as measured in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006. After controlling for observable students’ characteristics and self-selection, we did find a positive and significant effect of the frequency of computer use on science scores. In most countries, however, this effect seems larger when computer is used at home rather than at school. This finding questions the effectiveness of educational policies aimed at promoting computer use at school as a tool for learning.

A survey of the literature on asset price impacts on the real economy shows a much wider range of work on consumption and related wealth effects than on investment. The existence of wealth effects on consumption per se is little contested, but there remains an issue of whether different effects should hold between countries and across assets. On balance we contend that the literature suggests a role for housing and tangible wealth as well as financial wealth as a determination of consumption. In terms of investment there are numerous studies implying that uncertainty and balance sheet effects on investment can both be detected, albeit the latter more in micro than macro studies. In the light of the investment literature, we undertook panel investment functions on a macro basis for up to 23 OECD countries. Developing earlier work, it was found that the main significant effects arising from asset prices come from the financial accelerator, credit channel and Tobin’s Q (especially in the G7) and uncertainty as proxied by asset price volatility (especially in smaller OECD countries). There is also evidence for non-linearities in volatility. Descriptive analysis as well as tentative cross-sectional regression showed that both balance sheet and uncertainty channels played a role in the recent financial crisis, when investment fell sharply, although the simple accelerator was also important. The work has implications for monetary, fiscal and regulatory policies, all of which can impact on asset prices and the financial sector and thus via this channel on the wider economy.

In this paper we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the euro area GDP growth and unemployment rate forecasts collected in the quarterly ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) over the period 1999Q1–2008Q4. Our results suggest that while SPF forecasts generally appear to be slightly superior to naïve and purely backwardlooking benchmarks, forecast errors nonetheless exhibit a high degree of persistence. In addition, our analysis of the heterogeneity across individual SPF replies suggests that the broad pattern of the individual forecasts is essentially the same as that of the aggregate SPF results. This may refl ect a high degree of commonality in the information available (and not available) to panel members, thus leading them to “get it wrong” (or right) not only in the aggregate, but also individually. In particular, although a small number of forecasters perform substantially above average for some variables and horizons, none does so systematically for all variables and all horizons. Lastly, we have presented and assessed the information about forecast uncertainty provided by the SPF. In line with other studies based on the US SPF, disagreement among panel members does not appear to be a good proxy for overall macroeconomic uncertainty, i.e ., a high degree of consensus is not necessarily an indication of a low level of forecast uncertainty. Our analysis also suggests that, at the individual level, panel members may not fully internalise the overall level of macroeconomic uncertainty. For example, compared with the level of uncertainty indicated by the historical volatility of actual GDP growth and the unemployment rate, the perceptions of individual panel members about uncertainty appear quite low. This possible underestimation of overall uncertainty is much less severe when densities are aggregated across forecasters.

I use three non-linear econometric models to identify and analyze business cycles in the Peruvian economy for the period 1980:1-2008:4. The models are the Smooth Transition Autoregressive (STAR) model suggested by Teräsvirta (1994), the extended version of the MarkovSwitching model proposed by Hamilton (1989), and the plucking model of Friedman (1964, 1993). The results indicate strong rejection of the null hypothesis of linearity. The majority of models identify quarters concentrated around 1988-1989 and 1990-1991 as recession times. Other important events which happened in the Peruvian economy (natural disaster in 1983, effects of the Asian and Russian crises in 1990s, terrorist activities in 1980s) are not selected except as atypical observations. Most of models also identify the period 1995:1-2008:4 as a very long and stable period of moderate-high growth rates. From the perspective of the Peruvian economic history and from a statistical point of view, the MSIAH(3) model is the preferred model.