This study examines the relationship between firms' declarations about environmental issues and actual environmental performance improvement across a set of key environmental performance indicators. Multilevel regression analysis was conducted using a unique data set comprising 7449 firms from 22 industries headquartered in 86 countries for the period 2009 to 2023. Models were specified at three observation levels (time, individual firm, and industry/country group of firms) to clarify the relationships between corporate environmental statements and achievements. The analysis reveals that stronger corporate environmental commitment is associated with greater corporate improvement in terms of environmental performance indicators. This association is observed after controlling for year of observation, industry, country, and other time-varying firm- and board-specific attributes, including company size, financial performance, and board gender composition. Moreover, a high level of permanent environmental commitment is a consistent predictor of corporate environmental performance improvement. However, even transitory commitment appears to enhance corporate environmental performance improvement.

A gravity-based accessibility metric, the Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) enhanced with gaussian smoothing, is proposed to clarify the distribution of opportunities for compulsory education. Along with the physical locations of the homes and schools, the metric considers the population age structure and capacity to measure the population's accessibility to school services. The application of the 2SFCA within the '15-minute city' model and the analysis of València's urban environment revealed two main findings. First, the distribution of the accessibility scores after a spatial autocorrelation analysis closely reflected the per capita income across the city, irrespective of the type of school and level of compulsory education considered. Second, for most school age children, accessing a charter school is easier than access to a public school for primary and secondary education. The 2SFCA metric appears to adequately capture the uneven spatial distribution of educational opportunities, thus offering new insights into some of the forces the drive school segregation processes and their territorial foundations.

The gender pay gap, including at the top management level, is a socially relevant issue; however, it remains controversial. This study explores the distribution of pay by gender for executive directors of Spanish listed companies over the period 2012 to 2021. The analysis is based on multilevel regression. Three-level models with a fixed slope for gender show that female directors face an average 45% pay penalty relative to their male peers after controlling for time-varying individual and board/firm variables, time-invariant firm characteristics, and year of observation. A three-level model including all control variables and a random slope for gender shows that the gender pay penalty varies significantly across boards/firms (from 18% to 78%), with an average value of 46%. This finding suggests that unobservable heterogeneity among firms is a primary source of the observed gender pay gap.

Using data from the Brazilian Higher Education Census and other public institutions, this study aims to obtain and compare efficiency scores from stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) models for 56 Brazilian federal universities for the period of 2010 to 2016. The output distance function includes financial and human resources as inputs, and teaching, research, patents and third mission activities as outputs. The research is innovative considering: (i) the estimation of SFA for Brazilian universities as whole institutions, (ii) its comparison with DEA; and (iii) the inclusion of patents and third mission variables. The findings suggest there is inefficiency in Brazilian higher education production, with a very small increase through time and with some influence from universities and environmental characteristics. Thus, consolidated traditional institutions with university hospitals tend to be more efficient than the younger ones. The values and the rank of the efficiencies are sensitive to the model/method employed, presenting highly significant although modest correlations. In general, the inclusion of third mission activities improves the efficiencies for both approaches, mainly for DEA. Hence, as advised in other international comparative analyses, caution is required when deriving management and policy recommendations from the analytical results.

Efficiency can be defined as the ratio of a firm’s observed output to the maximum output which could be achieved given its input levels and available technology. It became a critical topic when considering the importance of Public Institutions to the Brazilian Higher Education system and its regional idiosyncrasies. Thus, this study applies Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluate the relative efficiency of all 56 Brazilian Federal Public Universities for the period of 2010 to 2016 considering some aspects of its regional distribution. The data come primarily from INEP Higher Education Census, CAPES and INPI. The results showed that 26 (47%) of the universities were efficient, with a general mean efficiency of 87%. Although the values by region diverge, they ended up converging to efficiencies between 75% (North) and 90% (Southeast). Through time, the Malmquist index suggests improvements higher than 30% but with different characteristics to the financial and the human resources and among regions. Results also suggest that R$ 2.96 billion by year were wasted due to inefficiency or that an additional 10% of outputs could be obtained.

School segregation, understood as the unequal distribution of various social groups in the schools of a territory, is of extraordinary importance for the equity and equal educational opportunities of the population. A good part of the studies on school segregation approximate the phenomenon by calculating indices that provide a general image of the educational system in different territorial contexts, allowing comparisons between them, but they do not report on the political or social conditions of territorial and educational contexts that can clarify the conditioning factors of the segregation processes. This article analyses the school segregation of students of foreign origin in the schools of the city of Valencia (Spain). The analysis relates the segregation indices of the system as a whole, of the city districts and of the ownership of the centres with data from residential segregation in the same territory, with the distribution and characteristics of the centres, and with an approach to family strategies. The results suggest multiple processes of segregation in which the schools reflect the residential segregation of their surroundings and emerge, in addition, segregations of a strictly school nature conditioned by the educational policy, the selection of schools and the strategic choice of families.

La segregación escolar, entendida como la distribución desigual de diversos grupos sociales en los centros escolares de un territorio, resulta de extraordinaria importancia para la equidad y la igualdad de oportunidades educativas de la población. Buena parte de los estudios sobre segregación escolar aproximan el fenómeno mediante el cálculo de índices que proporcionan una imagen general del sistema educativo en diferentes contextos territoriales, permitiendo hacer comparaciones entre ellos, pero no informan sobre las condiciones políticas o sociales de los contextos territoriales y educativos que puedan clarificar los factores condicionantes de los procesos de segregación. Este artículo analiza la segregación escolar del alumnado de origen extranjero en los centros escolares de la ciudad de València (España). El análisis relaciona los índices de segregación del conjunto del sistema, de los distritos de la ciudad y de la titularidad de los centros con datos de segregación residencial en el mismo territorio, con la distribución y características de los centros y con aproximaciones a las estrategias familiares. Los resultados sugieren múltiples procesos de segregación en los que las escuelas reflejan la segregación residencial de su entorno y emergen, además, segregaciones de carácter estrictamente escolar condicionadas por la política educativa, la selección de los centros escolares y la elección estratégica de las familias.

Gender inequality, and in particular wage gender inequality, has been considered a political priority in many countries over the last decades, with the focus centered on reducing the so-called gender pay gap, i.e., looking for a mean-convergence. However, approaching gender averages does not imply fairer (total and gender) wage distributions. Using microdata from a nationally representative sample of Spain's working population (N=216,769), we decompose total wage inequality into females and males' wage inequality (within groups) and gender inequality (between groups) and explore the extent to which these depend on those labor characteristics previously identified as determinants of the average differences between men and women ("gender pay gap"). For this dataset, the analyses show that gender wage inequality is higher than total wage inequality and both, total and gender wage inequalities, increase with a worker's age and education attainment.

La desigualdad de género, y en particular la desigualdad salarial de género, ha sido considerada una prioridad política en muchos países durante las últimas décadas, con foco puesto en reducir la llamada brecha salarial, es decir, en buscar una convergencia en media para los salarios de hombres y mujeres. Una aproximación de medias, sin embargo, no implica distribuciones salariales más justas (totales y de género). Utilizando los microdatos de una muestra nacionalmente representativa de la población ocupada de España (N = 216,769), descomponemos la desigualdad salarial total en desigualdad salarial femenina y masculina (intra-grupos) y desigualdad de género (entre-grupos) y exploramos hasta qué punto estos índices dependen de las características laborales previamente identificadas como determinantes de las diferencias promedio entre hombres y mujeres ("brecha salarial de género"). Para este conjunto de datos, los análisis muestran que la desigualdad salarial de género es más alta que la desigualdad salarial total y ambas la desigualdad salarial total y la desigualdad de género aumentan con la edad y el nivel educativo de los trabajadores.

This chapter highlights the relevance of micro-macro interfaces for the study of investment inflows in higher education, as an impulse concept, in the development of economies on a regional scale, as a response concept. The term ‘micro-macro interfaces’ refers to the systems of interactions that combine and channel the efforts made by individuals, often within collective organizations, to achieve their personal goals and the objectives set at the organizational level, and how the results from those efforts, once aggregated territorially, drive the rhythm of economic growth and the directions of regional development. The analysis brings together theory, research and practice from economics, management science, educational science and regional science in order to clarify the links among a number of connected impulse-response mechanisms at the individual, corporate and spatial levels. Since those impulse-response relationships involve concepts often measured at more than one level of aggregation, researchers have tended so far to exclude them from the models used to provide evidence on the economic and social impacts of higher education at the regional level. Particularly, the discussion focuses on the influence of local contexts and local invention and innovation systems, and the role of knowledge related spatial spillovers, on the one hand, and on the transition of individual university graduates from higher education institutions to post-graduate positions and careers within work organizations.

We describe an operational procedure to build an integrated information system (IIS) for monitoring and evaluating the performance of public broadcasting corporations (PBC). The procedure grounds in a conceptual framework derived from evaluation models, and consists of two stages. The first stage is the selection, through expert judgment, of simple indicators that illustrate the most relevant aspects of the corporations. The second stage is the definition of a system of indicators related to each level of the hierarchy of objectives planned by the corporations. The system of indicators has two levels. The first level is a basic indicator system that allows description and monitoring of the reality of the activities of a corporation on a daily basis. The second level consists of a strategic indicator system, which expresses the consequences that the activities of a PBC generate in its environment, both as short-term effects and as medium and long-term impacts.

The new digital context poses new challenges for corporate communication agents. In this new context, the availability of reliable information systems for decisions-makers is of particular importance; this is precisely the main objective of the RTV2025 project: the identification, selection and construction synthetic indicators on governance, financing, accountability, innovation, quality and value of the audio-visual public services. The Delphi method is one of the most used techniques to obtain and aggregate expert valuation on a complex issue; in our case, the Delphi will gather the opinion of a group of experts about the suitability of a list of partial indicators that will later serve as the basis for the synthetic indexes. Our specific Delphi proposal is structured in several stages: making an initial list of plausible individual indicators, designing of the questionnaires, selection of the panel of experts, first round of questionnaires, statistical analyse of the responses, second round of questionnaires.

This article aims at clarifying whether and how University Business Cooperation (UBC) can be expanded from knowledge transfer to the core field of education. Higher education institutions exert a decisive influence by teaching students to understand academic theories, methods and areas of knowledge, contributing to their cultural enrichment and development of personality, and preparing them for further work and other spheres of life. Higher education aims at establishing the basis of relevant knowledge that will help students to understand and acquire the competencies they will need in their professional lives. Universities supply graduates to the economy and that includes developing the right set of skills to acceptable levels. Consequently, an explicit goal of UBC should be to point out what those skills should be and how to target education at developing them. The competencies acquired by the flow of new graduates emerging each year from higher education institutions in the labour market is an expression of the multidimensional output obtained from the resources allocated to the higher education system. New ways for UBC are called to play a prominent role in defining both a model of teaching and learning that is better adjusted to social and economic demands and a dynamic and flexible system of continuing education to retrain people as social and economic conditions evolve. Nevertheless, the implementation of reforms in higher education calls for a deeper understanding of possible trade-offs between the diverse types of resources involved and the outcomes obtained. Resources should be examined in terms of their relative costs and the results interpreted with regard to their value to individuals and society.

El objetivo del trabajo es analizar la importancia de la educación superior, concretamente de los métodos de enseñanza-aprendizaje, en el comportamiento posterior de los graduados en el puesto de trabajo en relación a tres dimensiones del liderazgo: liderazgo orientado a las tareas, a las relaciones y al cambio. Las competencias profesionales desarrolladas por los graduados durante sus estudios son el canal de transmisión desde la educación al futuro desempeño como lideres. Para ello se estimaron modelos de ecuaciones estructurales (SEM) con una muestra de aproximadamente 3.500 jóvenes graduados por universidades españolas provenientes de la base de datos REFLEX. Los resultados obtenidos indican que el comportamiento como lideres en las tres dimensiones analizadas depende crucialmente del nivel competencial de los individuos en determinadas competencias clave. Las competencias relacionadas con la capacidad de liderazgo son desarrolladas durante los estudios universitarios y posteriormente ampliadas a través de la experiencia y formación en el puesto. El análisis también identifica los métodos de enseñanza-aprendizaje que presentan una mayor influencia en el desarrollo de las competencias para el liderazgo. La principal implicación del análisis consiste en que un entorno educativo adecuado puede favorecer la adquisición durante los estudios de las competencias necesarias para el ejercicio de la capacidad de liderazgo, lo que a su vez favorece el desarrollo posterior de estas mismas competencias en las primeras experiencias laborales, incrementando asi la propensión de los graduados a actuar efectivamente como lideres en las organizaciones para las que trabajan en las tres dimensiones del liderazgo analizadas.

An empirical two-equation dynamic panel-data model system with fixed effects is proposed to analyze the relationship between knowledge creation and economic performance across regions over time. Estimates of the model for Spanish regions show that (i) knowledge creation depends on local R&D effort, on the amount of knowledge in use, and on knowledge creation in neighboring regions; and (ii) assimilation of new knowledge depends on local knowledge creation and on assimilation of knowledge in neighboring regions. Both processes include region-specific context fixed effects and region-specific time effects, representing region-specific dynamic influences. The results imply that (a) efficiency gains at regional level may be achieved by investing locally in the creation of new knowledge, either technological or organizational; (b) creation of knowledge in a region may be promoted by using greater amounts of already existing knowledge, as well as by increasing local R&D effort; (c) both knowledge creation and knowledge assimilation spread to/from neighboring regions; and (d) regional contexts influence both knowledge creation and knowledge assimilation separately.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to analyse three dimensions of leadership behaviour in professional environments by disclosing the specific competency profile developed by those who actually lead in work organizations.Design/methodology/approach - Using data from a graduate survey oriented to provide evidence on the transition from higher education to labour market, a structural equations model (SEM) is specified and estimated to explain leadership behaviour at work in terms of the competency profile developed by individuals and its determinants. The competency profile behind leadership behaviour is the combination of two elements: the competency accumulated through professional experience and the competency profile of individuals five years before, which was partially a result of higher education. The relationships are tested on two subsamples of graduates from engineering and business/economics fields, and on a sample of graduates from all study fields.Findings - Estimates show evidence of significant direct and indirect effects of a specific competency profile on three connected dimensions of leadership behaviour at work: tasks, relations and change. The results show direct effects of competency profiles at the time of graduation on competency profiles five years later, and of specific higher education ways of teaching and learning on competency profiles at the time of graduation. The effects are also significant by field of study with slight differences on estimates size and on the composition of effects.Originality/value - The analysis brings together leadership behaviour, competency development and education production literatures to help scholars and managers to better understand the relationships between the process of competency development and individual leadership behaviour in working environments.

This paper analyzes individuals' propensity to innovate in professional environments, by focusing on the specific competency profile of individuals who play a role in the incorporation of product, technological, and knowledge innovations at work. The analysis draws on economic and managerial literature on innovation, innovative behavior, and competencies to gain a better understanding of the relationships between the process of competency development and innovative behavior in working environments. Using data from REFLEX, a European survey on the transition from higher education to labor markets, the empirical component of this study estimates discrete response models to explain the propensity of individuals to innovate at work. The models take the responses to a set of 19 questionnaire items as the basis for determining individuals' competency profiles, while also incorporating firm, working environment, and personal characteristics. The estimation results provide evidence of significant marginal effects of specific competencies on the probability that individuals act as innovators at the workplace. Competencies such as alertness to new opportunities, ability to present products, ideas or reports, ability to mobilize the capacities of others, ability to come up with new ideas and solutions, and ability to use computers and the Internet appear to have stronger marginal effects on the likelihood of innovating and, consequently, emerge as key competencies in explaining the propensity of individuals to become innovators in their working environments.

This paper examines the production function relationship between the educational resources applied during study and Spanish university graduates' development of competencies related to innovation. The data set comes from the Reflex European graduate survey and includes about 5,500 individuals. The educational resources applied are expressed through the prevalence of different teaching/learning methods used during students' time at university, while the human capital brought into the equation by students is represented by student effort at university and students' personal and family background. The central hypothesis being tested is that there are statistically significant relationships between the development of different innovative capacities by graduates and the inputs (educational resources and human capital) applied at university, with special reference to teaching/learning methods. The relationships between educational resources and output are modelled using a set of stochastic frontier equations with compound random disturbances whose dependent variables are the degree to which each competency is developed. The results indicate that proactive teaching methods in general and problem-based learning in particular have a telling influence on the development of the necessary competencies for innovating at work. The marginal effects of all other resources, whether educational or personal, are much weaker than those of teaching method. No significant evidence is found of effects attributable to unobservable student ability.