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The autonomous governments of two regions in Spain established mobile bans in schools as of the year 2015. Exploiting the across-region variation introduced by such a quasi-natural experiment, this study aims to perform a comparative-case analysis to investigate the impact of this non-spending-based policy on regional Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores in maths and sciences and bullying incidence.

The authors apply the synthetic control method and diff-in-diff estimation to compare the treated regions with the rest of regions in Spain before and after the intervention.

The results show noticeable reductions of bullying incidence among teenagers in the two treated regions. The authors also find positive and significant effects of this policy on the PISA scores of the Galicia region that are equivalent to 0.6–0.8 years of learning in maths and around 0.72 to near one year of learning in sciences.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical study analysing the impact of mobile phone bans in schools on bullying cases, exploiting variation across regions (or other units), years and age intervals. Besides, the scarce formal evidence that exists on the consequences of the mobile phones use in students’ academic achievement comes from a micro perspective, while the paper serves as one more piece of evidence from a macro perspective.

The purpose of the study is to evaluate whether nighttime luminosity sourced from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Linescan System satellite sensors is a suitable proxy for measuring poverty in Africa.

Our study performs wavelet coherence analysis to investigate the time-frequency synchronization between the nightlight data and “income-to-wealth” ratio for 39 African countries between 1992 and 2012.

All-in-all, the authors find that approximately a third of African countries produce positive synchronizations between nighttime data and “income-to-wealth” ratio and hence conclude that most African countries are not at liberty to use nighttime data to proxy conventional poverty statistics.

In differing from previous studies, the authors examine the suitability of nightlight intensity as a proxy of poverty for individual African countries using much more rigorous analysis.

Legislation plays a vital role in solving carbon emissions reduction and climate change issues. China began to implement a low-carbon economic policy in 2010, but the effect of the policy needs to be evaluated. Accordingly, this paper aims to discuss China’s low-carbon policy through exploring the following two questions, namely, whether the policy effect reaches the expected goal and whether the policy effects will balance economic development and emission reduction. Then, the paper puts forward suggestions for the improvement of China’s low-carbon policy.

This paper is organized around three distinct aspects of policy effect evaluation. This paper uses the synthetic control method to construct a policy effect evaluation model and conducts a quasi-natural experiment. The paper selects annual panel data from 2003 to 2015, which is selected from 33 provinces. A comparative analysis of carbon dioxide emissions, energy consumption and economic development between Hubei Province and Liaoning Province.

The results reveal that the implementation of the low-carbon pilot province policy in 2010 has a significant impact on the emission reduction effect of Liaoning Province, but the impact on the emission reduction effect of Hubei Province is not significant. The carbon emission trading system implemented in 2012 has reduced the emission reductions in Hubei Province and Liaoning Province has achieved better emission reduction effects after the implementation of this policy. After the implementation of the policy, the economic development of Hubei Province has been improved, but it has not brought help to the economic development of Liaoning Province. These findings provide new insights into the use of an emissions trading system for improving economic development and ultimately facilitate the attainment of the broader goal of sustainability.

This paper proposes an innovative policy effect evaluation method by considering the status of unit gross domestic product, fixed asset investment in the energy industry, energy consumption, emission reduction technology innovation and other evaluation indicators. This paper contributes to broadening current methods of policy effect evaluation in China.

This paper aims to examine the short-term effect of the Arizona Immigration Law of 2010 (SB 1070) on the noncitizen Hispanic state population.

To get a consistent estimate of this effect, a synthetic control method has been used to calculate a suitable counterfactual.

Results indicate that this bill produced a statistically significant short-term reduction in the proportion of noncitizen Hispanics in Arizona between 10 and 15 per cent. However, the evidence suggests that this effect vanishes after a few months.

These findings are consistent with previous evidence of the high mobility of the undocumented population in the US, and contribute to the understanding of the effects of federal and state-level immigration legislation.

Este artículo examina el efecto a corto plazo de la Ley de Inmigración de Arizona de 2010 (SB 1070) sobre la población hispana no ciudadana.

Para obtener una estimación consistente sobre este efecto, he utilizado un método de control sintético para calcular una hipótesis de contraste adecuada.

Los resultados indican que este proyecto produjo una reducción a corto plazo estadísticamente significativa en la proporción de hispanos no ciudadanos en Arizona —entre el 10% y el 15%—. Sin embargo, la evidencia sugiere que este efecto desaparece después de unos meses.

Estos hallazgos son consistentes con la evidencia previa de la alta movilidad de la población indocumentada en los Estados Unidos, y contribuyen a la comprensión de los efectos de la legislación de inmigración federal y estatal.

Población hispana, Inmigración ilegal, Control sintético

Artículo de investigación

Over the past 20 years, China's infrastructure has developed at an extraordinary speed. The current literature mainly focuses on the effects of political incentives on the infrastructure. However, this paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime is an important clue and that the supernormal development of China's infrastructure is an explicable result for that.

This paper theoretically proves that in a politically centralized and economically decentralized economic entity with a public land-ownership regime, the self-financing mechanism formed by local officials through regulation of the land-grant price is the primary factor that influences the optimal supply volume of infrastructure in a region, in addition to political and economic incentives, and whether the self-financing mechanism can be formed or not depends on the structure of a country's land regime, which can help to explain the difference between the development of infrastructure in China and that in other developing countries from a theoretical angle.

The paper suggests that the mode is facing an important transformation toward land reform and new-type urbanization construction, and the replication and promotion of China's experience in infrastructure construction are of further significance under the Belt and Road Initiative as it provides a method for helping developing countries to eliminate infrastructure bottlenecks.

Through the test of multinational panel data, the paper indicates that the structural change of China's land regime around 1990 had an overall effect on the supernormal development of infrastructure in China. The paper indicates that the “land-based development mode” of China's infrastructure indeed contributed to the supernormal development of infrastructure in China, but there are still some shortcomings in this mode.

With the use of the grey incidence analysis (GIA), indicators such as the absolute degree of grey incidence (ε_ij), relative degree of grey incidence (r_ij) or synthetic degree of grey incidence (ρ_ij) are calculated. However, it seems that some assumptions made to calculate them are arguable, which may also have a material impact on the reliability of test results. In this paper, the authors analyse one of the indicators of the GIA, namely the relative degree of grey incidence. The aim of the article was to verify the hypothesis: in determining the relative degree of grey incidence, the method of standardisation of elements in a series significantly affects the test results.

To achieve the purpose of the article, the authors used the numerical simulation method and the logical analysis method (in order to draw conclusions from our tests).

It turned out that the applied method of standardising elements in series when calculating the relative degree of grey incidence significantly affects the test results. Moreover, the manner of standardisation used in the original method (which involves dividing all elements by the first element) is not the best. Much more reliable results are obtained by a standardisation that involves dividing all elements by their arithmetic mean.

Limitations of the conducted evaluation involve in particular the limited scope of inference. This is since the obtained results referred to only one of the indicators classified into the GIA.

In this article, the authors have evaluated the model of GIA in which the relative degree of grey incidence is determined. As a result of the research, the authors have proposed a recommendation regarding a change in the method of standardising variables, which will contribute to obtaining more reliable results in relational tests using the grey system theory.

The number of patents in China has grown rapidly in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how patents impact economic development in China.

This paper developed an empirical model by using panel data of 42 China's patent-intensive industries to investigate the economic contribution made by Chinese patent-intensive manufacturing industries.

This paper found that the intensity of valid patents is strongly positively related to economic growth. The intensity of yearly added patents presented an inverse U-shaped and a U-shaped curve with the economy made by China’s patent-intensive industries. The correlativity mainly depended on whether the patent intensity converges near the economic indicators. Meanwhile, from the perspective of input–output efficiency, for China’s patent-intensive industries, R&D institutes were overinvested, followed by R&D intensity and R&D staff.

Investigating patent influence on economic development is quite complex research. Existing studies have mainly focused on patent protection in legal systems, but have not provided a definitive answer to what the real influence is. This study sought to narrow this gap from the patent economy perspective.

This research paper aim at providing a new approach of calculating the destinations competitiveness index. How can these variables been aggregated in other to reflect the realities of very distinct productive environments? We assume that: The weighting of variables provides a better measure of destinations competitiveness. Base on the Neo-Technological theory, after a life cycle differentiation, we used a panel data approach to calculate the weight of each variable as the spearman correlation coefficient of its contribution to tourism inflows growth. After integrating these weights, we came to the point that by applying an appropriate weight to its components, we end up having a competitiveness index that significantly improve the correlation between competitiveness and tourism inflows growth.

This paper aims to present the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method in an accessible language to a broad research audience from a variety of management-related fields.

The paper describes the DiD method, starting with an intuitive explanation, goes through the main assumptions and the regression specification and covers the use of several robustness methods. Recurrent examples from the literature are used to illustrate the different concepts.

By providing an overview of the method, the authors cover the main issues involved when conducting DiD studies, including the fundamentals as well as some recent developments.

The paper can hopefully be of value to a broad range of management scholars interested in applying impact evaluation methods.