Blanca Moreno

Applying Information Theory to Small Groups Assessment: Emotions and Well-being at Work

This paper explores and analyzes the relations between emotions and well-being in a sample of aviation personnel, passenger crew (flight attendants). There is an increasing interest in studying the influence of emotions and its role as psychosocial factors in the work environment as they are able to act as facilitators or shock absorbers. The contrast of the theoretical models by using traditional parametric techniques requires a large sample size to the efficient estimation of the coefficients that quantify the relations between variables. Since the available sample that we have is small, the most common size in European enterprises, we used the maximum entropy principle to explore the emotions that are involved in the psychosocial risks. The analyses show that this method takes advantage of the limited information available and guarantee an optimal estimation, the results of which are coherent with theoretical models and numerous empirical researches about emotions and well-being.

Combining economic forecasts through information measures

The increasing number of prospective sources and methods provides a wide variety of forecasts for a given economic variable. Therefore, the theory suggests the convenience of combining the individual results to obtain a single aggregated prediction. The traditional methods for combining forecasts are based on the relative past performance of the forecasts to be combined. However, the number of forecasters is increasing considerably in the last years so it is not possible to have enough information about their past forecast task. This article focuses on the information theory as a framework to combine experts’ forecasts when information is limited. More specifically, we use the principle of entropy maximization to obtain a combined forecast from Shannons measure (1948) and we also propose its extension to the quadratic uncertainty measure (Pérez, 1985). The empirical behaviour of both procedures is tested over a pool of forecasts referring to Spanish economic growth.

Analyzing the impact of fossil fuel import reliance on electricity prices: The case of the Iberian Electricity Market:

Spain and Portugal are highly dependent on energy from abroad, importing more than 70% of all the energy they consume. This high energy dependence could involve important effects on the level and stability of their electricity prices as a half the gross electricity generated in both countries came from power stations using imported combustible fuels (such as natural gas, coal and oil). In general, changes in the prices of these fossil fuels can directly affect household electricity prices, since generation costs are likely to be transmitted through to the wholesale electricity market. Moreover, in the framework of the European Union Emission Trading System, electricity production technologies tend to incorporate their costs of carbon dioxide emission allowances in sale offers with the consequent increase of the electricity prices. The objective of this paper is to analyze the influence of fossil fuel costs and prices of carbon dioxide emission allowances in the EU on the Spanish and Portuguese electricity prices. With this aim, a maximum entropy econometric approach is used. The obtained results indicate that not only the price of imported gas are very important in explaining Spanish and Portuguese electricity prices but also the price of carbon dioxide emission allowances in the EU.

Towards an auction system in the allocation of EU Emission Rights: its effect on firms’ stock market returns

The impact of the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS) on firms’ stock market returns relies on the system employed to allocate emission allowances. This impact has been analysed in the literature for the EU ETS Phase I and II periods under which allowances were given for free. However, the effect during the current phase, Phase III, where the allocation of emission permits is based on an auction system has not yet been analysed and discussed. In this framework, this paper discloses the results of a research aimed at investigating the interactions between the stock market returns of Spanish industry sectors under EU ETS and emission rights prices during the first year and half of Phase III. A cointegrated Vector Error Correction analysis is employed for the period covering January 1st 2013 until July 31st 2014. The analysis presents statistically significant positive long-run impact of EU ETS on power sector, cement and petroleum and negative impact on iron and steel sectors. No short-run interactions were found for the sectors analysed.

An Analysis of the Effect of Renewable Energies on Spanish Electricity Market Efficiency

The deployment of renewable energy is a key concept in European Union by environmental and economic reasons. This energy contributes to the securing of the objectives established by Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Kyoto, 11 December 1997) which entails that European Union has made the commitment to reduce their emissions by 8% during the period 2008-2012 and by at least 20% below 1990 levels by 2020.

Efectes de les estratègies d’ensenyament i aprenentatge universitaris en el rendiment acadèmic

Cal esperar que la implementacio de l’Espai Europeu d’Educacio Superior millori el rendiment academic dels estudiants. Aquest treball analitza, amb tecniques estadistiques multivariants, la importancia de les caracteristiques sociodemografiques, de l’actitud i de l’esforc de l’estudiant, aixi com la importancia dels coneixements previs i del sistema d’aprenentage com a factors dels resultats academics. Els resultats mostren que l’avaluacio continuada te un efecte indubtable per superar l’assignatura. L’assistencia a classe, l’esforc realitzat i la satisfaccio amb els estudis universitaris seleccionats i amb l’asignatura influeixen de manera positiva sobre els resultats obtinguts pels estudiants. L’estudi tambe posa de manifest la necessitat d’augmentar la interaccio amb els alumnes.

Entropy Econometrics for combining regional economic forecasts: A Data-Weighted Prior Estimator

Forecast combination has been studied in econometrics for a long time, and the literature has shown the superior performance of forecast combination over individual predictions. However, there is still controversy on which is the best procedure to specify the forecast weights. This paper explores the possibility of using a procedure based on Entropy Econometrics, which allows setting the weights for the individual forecasts as a mixture of different alternatives. In particular, we examine the ability of the Data-Weighted Prior Estimator proposed by Golan (J Econom 101(1):165–193, 2001) to combine forecasting models in a context of small sample sizes, a relative common scenario when dealing with time series for regional economies. We test the validity of the proposed approach using a simulation exercise and a real-world example that aims at predicting gross regional product growth rates for a regional economy. The forecasting performance of the Data-Weighted Prior Estimator proposed is compared with other combining methods. The simulation results indicate that in scenarios of heavily ill-conditioned datasets the approach suggested dominates other forecast combination strategies. The empirical results are consistent with the conclusions found in the numerical experiment.