The effects of poor financial information systems on the long term sustainability of local public services. Empirical evidence from the Catalan Municipalities

In this paper we describe the existence of financial illusion in public accounting and we comment on its effects for the future sustainability of local public services. We relate these features to the lack of incentives amongst public managers for improving the financial reporting and thus management of public assets. Financial illusion pays off for politicians and managers since it allows for larger public expenditure increases and managerial slack, these being arguments in their utility functions. This preference is strengthen by the short time perspective of politically appointed public managers. Both factors run against public accountability. This hypothesis is tested for Spain by using an unique sample. We take data from around forty Catalan local authorities with population above 20,000 for the financial years 1993-98. We build this data basis from the Catalan Auditing Office Reports in a way that it can be linked to some other local social and economic variables in order to test our assumptions. The results confirm that there is a statistical relationship between the financial illusion index (FI as constructed in the paper) and higher current expenditure. This reflects on important overruns and increases of the delay in paying suppliers, as well as on a higher difficulties to face capital finance. Mechanisms for FI creation have to do among other factors, with delays in paying suppliers (and thereafter higher future financial costs per unit of service), no adequate provision for bad debts and lack of appropriate capital funding either for reposition or for new equipments. For this, it is crucial to monitor the way in which capital transfers are accounted in local public sheet balances. As a result, for most of the Municipalities we analyse, the funds for guaranteeing continuity and sustainability of public services provision are today at risk. Given managerial incentives at present in public institutions, we conclude that public regulation recently enforced for assuring better information systems in local public management may not be enough to change the current state of affairs.Public management, financial information systems, financial illusion, and Spanish local authorities

Dynamic Model-based Management of Service-Oriented Infrastructure.

Models are an effective tool for systems and software design. They allow software architects to abstract from the non-relevant details. Those qualities are also useful for the technical management of networks, systems and software, such as those that compose service oriented architectures. Models can provide a set of well-defined abstractions over the distributed heterogeneous service infrastructure that enable its automated management. We propose to use the managed system as a source of dynamically generated runtime models, and decompose management processes into a composition of model transformations. We have created an autonomic service deployment and configuration architecture that obtains, analyzes, and transforms system models to apply the required actions, while being oblivious to the low-level details. An instrumentation layer automatically builds these models and interprets the planned management actions to the system. We illustrate these concepts with a distributed service update operation

An Autonomous Engine for Services Configuration and Deployment.

The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective multiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this paper proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies, and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g., installation, service binding, update, or configuration). The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to validate the feasibility of this propos

How wide is the gap? An investigation of gender wage differences using quantile regression

In this paper we examine the determinants of wages and decompose the observed differences across genders into the "explained by different characteristics" and "explained by different returns components" using a sample of Spanish workers. Apart from the conditional expectation of wages, we estimate the conditional quantile functions for men and women and find that both the absolute wage gap and the part attributed to different returns at each of the quantiles, far from being well represented by their counterparts at the mean, are greater as we move up in the wage range.Gender wage gap, quantile regression, education

Enhancement of entanglement in one-dimensional disordered systems

The pairwise quantum entanglement of sites in disordered electronic one-dimensional systems (rings) is studied. We focus on the effect of diagonal and off diagonal disorder on the concurrence $C_{ij}$ between electrons on neighbor and non neighbor sites $i,j$ as a function of band filling. In the case of diagonal disorder, increasing the degree of disorder leads to a decrease of the concurrence with respect to the ordered case. However, off-diagonal disorder produces a surprisingly strong enhancement of entanglement. This remarkable effect occurs near half filling, where the concurrence becomes up to 15% larger than in the ordered system.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure

Patrones de internacionalización en psicología desde la revista interamericana de psicología

Con 50 años de trayectoria, la Revista Interamericana de Psicología (RIP) se ha consolidado como un órgano central de debate y ha posibilitado un intercambio de ideas cada vez más global en la psicología. Observando el papel central de la RIP en el desenvolvimiento de la disciplina, el presente escrito traza una hoja de ruta de la revista, con énfasis en el impacto que ha tenido en la configuración de la comunidad de psicología. El escrito parte de un enfoque distinto desde el cual analizar el papel de la RIP: tendencias de publicación, colaboración, uso, Índice de Esfuerzo Editorial e Índice de Internacionalización; y arroja como resultado estándares altos de internacionalización. En ello se considera el periodo 2005-2015 y se recurre a Redalyc.org como fuente de información

Producción científica venezolana: apuntes sobre su pérdida de liderazgo en la región latinoamericana

Se analiza la evolución de la producción y colaboración científicas de Venezuela, país que se ha caracterizado por su pérdida de liderazgo en los últimos años. El universo de análisis lo constituyen 1.117 revistas iberoamericanas de acceso abierto de la base de datos redalyc.org, con más de 250 mil artículos en un periodo de 10 años (2005-2014). La caída de la ciencia venezolana se aprecia desde bases de corriente principal (en Scopus, a través del SJR, presentó 1.857 artículos en 2005, representaba el 3.4% de la región. En 2014 tuvo 1.592 artículos, representaba el 1.44% de la región. Es decir, tuvo una caída del 14.27%), así como desde Redalyc (donde contaba con 875 artículos en 2005 y representaba el 5.5% de la región; en 2014 tuvo 791 artículos, representando el 3.0% de la región. La caída es del 9.6%); base de datos que permite apreciar además una alta tasa de concentración en la producción científica y editorial de Venezuela, así como un comportamiento endógeno en términos de producción y colaboración

Engineering disorder in three-dimensional photonic crystals

We demonstrate the effect of introducing controlled disorder in self-assembled three-dimensional photonic crystals. Disorders are induced through controlling the self-assembling process using an electrolyte of specific concentrations. Structural characterization reveals increase in disorder with increase in concentrations of the electrolyte. Reflectivity and transmittance spectra are measured to probe the photonic stop gap at different levels of disorder. With increase in disorder the stop gap is vanished and that results in a fully random photonic nanostructure where the diffuse scattered intensity reaches up to 100%. Our random photonic nanostructure is unique in which all scatters have the same size and shape. We also observe the resonant characteristics in the multiple scattering of light.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure