Suchergebnisse

How are higher education organizations going to cope with the challenges of a society that is continuously changing? Although the education sector needs to adapt to technological and socioeconomic changes, methodologies on which we have relied in the past will not be adequate in the future. In fact, the past represents just one of an infinite number of possible outcomes and the future may involve a completely different framework. As a consequence, we should attempt to identify an appropriate technique for analyzing higher education in the future. This paper aims to identify the advances and new trends that will allow the definition of a new model for higher education. A crucial paradox is also outlined: whether the witnessed never-before-seen democratization in the accessibility to higher education is going to co-exist in the future with a possible scenario that might restrict its access because of increasing competition and concentration of higher education organizations. We posit that the quantum approach to time and change (QATC) is a suitable approach that helps to set out the future scenario where the current educational model will be called into question; it is also a key tool for studying the relationship between higher education and society.

This work investigates the relationships between the retail payment system, monetary aggregates and economic activity in Spain from a long-run perspective. This approach is considered from the perspective of the transformations favored by ICT in the payment system, which incorporates increasingly more and more cashless instruments. The methodology used is based on cointegration analysis and error correction models. Likewise, a new indicator of some trends in the implementation of cashless transactions in payment systems is proposed; this measure has been applied to Spain and other European countries. With respect to long-run relationships, we demonstrate the relevant (and direct) impact of changes in the monetary system and national income on the value of cashless transactions. Regarding the short-run, the most important relationships in terms of the value of cashless transactions are those related to the real estate sector. The empirical results evidence the intensive progress of the cashless society in Spain, where the banking sector, regulatory changes and ICT development have played a key role.

This paper studies the convergence of self-employment by gender in the European Union, through tests for the order of integration and cluster analysis, in order to investigate the occurrence of two types of convergence: between genders and among European countries. The paper makes two contributions to the literature: (1) theo-retically, it provides useful insights into the macroeconomic determinants of self-employment; (2) methodologically, it uses unit roots, fractional integration and clus-ter analysis to assess convergence. The empirical results point at mixed evidence of convergence, but with clear differences between the core and the periphery of Europe.