Argentina's Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies after the Convertibility Regime Collapse

This paper offers a comprehensive look at how Argentina managed a remarkable economic recovery from its collapse in 2001. The authors show how the Argentine government's policy of targeting a stable and competitive real exchange rate was crucial to the country's economic recovery. They also analyze the various sources of aggregate demand and government revenue in different phases of the expansion. In addition to the crucial role of the exchange rate, the authors look at other policies - such as an export tax, capital controls, and the default on much of the country's sovereign debt - which were met with disapproval by many economists and other commentators but played an important role in the recovery.

A Concise History of Exchange Rate Regimes in Latin America

This paper analyzes the experience of the major Latin American countries including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru and others in the post-World-War period, up to the crisis caused by the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble. The authors provide a detailed historical analysis that takes into account the most important economic events that helped determine exchange rate policy, and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the various exchange rate regimes, and their impact on outcomes including economic growth and inflation.capital controls, capital flows

Real Business Cycles in Emerging Countries?

We use more than one century of Argentine and Mexican data to estimate the structural parameters of a small-open-economy real-business-cycle model driven by nonstationary productivity shocks. We find that the RBC model does a poor job at explaining business cycles in emerging countries. We then estimate an augmented model that incorporates shocks to the country premium and financial frictions. We find that the estimated financial-friction model provides a remarkably good account of business cycles in emerging markets and, importantly, assigns a negligible role to nonstationary productivity shocks.

Horizontal Inequity in Access to Healthcare Services and Educational Level in Spain

The aim of this study is to measure horizontal equity in the use of healthcare services in Spain, proposing two methodological innovations. First by defending it as equality of access for equal need, irrespective of educational level, unlike the prevailing methodological approach to horizontal equity which relates it to income. Second, by estimating it by means of the slope index of the inequality of characteristics, analagous to the inequity index proposed by Kakwani, Wagstaff and van Doorslaer (1997; HIWV) but presenting some methodological advantages, the greater robustness of the data available on educational level than of those on income, and the possibility of isolating the net effect of the educational level on the use of healthcare by controlling for other variables. The methodology is designed in three parts: (1) estimation of the relationship between the educational level and the use of healthcare services by means of a model of the likelihood of demand for healthcare services, commonly used in the literature; (2) estimation of the relationship between educational level and health by approximating a production function of individuals' health according to their personal characteristics and other factors conditioning health; and (3) estimation of the slope index of inequality as a measure of horizontal inequity, using educational level instead of income as the criterion for ranking individuals. The data base used was a sample of 55,598 observations from the Survey of disabilities, handicaps and state of health of 1999, carried out in Spain. No significant statistical association was found between educational level and use of healthcare services. On the other hand, the relationship between educational level and health, with the three proxy variables used (perception of health, days of limitation and number of chronic illnesses) shows a positive correlation, i.e. an increase in educational level is associated with a greater probability of enjoying better health. Horizontal inequity, measured by the proposed slope index of inequality, gives a range of statistically significant values between 13.91% and 9.40%, depending on cases, i.e. the significant inverse relationship between state of health and educational level is not reflected proportionally in healthcare use, implying that, with greater need, the access of individuals with a lower educational level to public healthcare services is the same as for the rest. These results suggest that the educational level may be a variable to consider when characterizing the healthcare needs of a population in a defined geographical area, at least from the normative characterization of horizontal equity proposedEducation and health; Healthcare needs; Horizontal Inequity; Logistic regression ; Ordinal regression; Regional funding

Understanding unethical behaviors at the university level: a multiple regression analysis

Unethical behaviors such as corruption pose an important challenge for students, professors, and other university members. We aimed to clarify students' willingness to engage in corruption in a Spanish public university. In all, 3,475 undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD students completed an online questionnaire assessing four corruption scenarios: favoritism, bribery, fraud, and embezzlement. Multiple regression analysis suggested that justifiability, risk perception, and perceived corruption played a key role in explaining corrupt intention. Behavioral intention to engage in corruption is a complex phenomenon explained by not only peers' behaviors, but also individuals' justifications of their acts and risk perceptions

Lysophosphatidic acid receptor 1 labels seizure-induced hippocampal reactive neural stem cells and controls their activation.

149 p.En la regulación de la neurogénesis hipocampal adulta, un paso fundamental es la división de las células madre neurales (NSCs) ya que, tras activarse, se dividen varias veces consecutivas y se diferencian después en astrocitos. En esta tesis demostramos que aumentar su tasa de activación mediante hiperexcitación neuronal conduce a su agotamiento e induce un cambio en su diferenciación. Tras provocar epilepsia directamente en el hipocampo de ratones, hemos observado que las NSCs aumentan su tasa de activación pero dejan de generar neuronas y se transforman en NSCs reactivas (React-NSCs) que se diferencian en astrocitos reactivos (RAs). Hemos validado mediante el empleo de una cepa transgénica que el receptor 1 del ácido lisofosfatídico (LPA1) sirve como marcador para rastrear las React-NSCs durante su conversión en RAs. Además, hemos probado que la deleción del gen LPA1 disminuye la activación masiva de las NSCs producida por las convulsiones epilépticas. Al someter a ratones a un modelo alternativo de epilepsia, actuando en la amígdala, comprobamos que las NSCs también se dividen más y se transforman en React-NSCs, demostrando que las NSCs se ven afectadas independientemente del sitio de origen de las convulsiones. Estos resultados muestran cómo en condiciones de hiperexcitación neuronal severa las NSCs contribuyen a la gliosis reactiva, lo que puede empeorar el pronóstico de la epilepsia, y que el receptor LPA1 participa en esta nueva función de las NSCs

Lysophosphatidic acid receptor 1 labels seizure-induced hippocampal reactive neural stem cells and controls their activation.

149 p.En la regulación de la neurogénesis hipocampal adulta, un paso fundamental es la división de las células madre neurales (NSCs) ya que, tras activarse, se dividen varias veces consecutivas y se diferencian después en astrocitos. En esta tesis demostramos que aumentar su tasa de activación mediante hiperexcitación neuronal conduce a su agotamiento e induce un cambio en su diferenciación. Tras provocar epilepsia directamente en el hipocampo de ratones, hemos observado que las NSCs aumentan su tasa de activación pero dejan de generar neuronas y se transforman en NSCs reactivas (React-NSCs) que se diferencian en astrocitos reactivos (RAs). Hemos validado mediante el empleo de una cepa transgénica que el receptor 1 del ácido lisofosfatídico (LPA1) sirve como marcador para rastrear las React-NSCs durante su conversión en RAs. Además, hemos probado que la deleción del gen LPA1 disminuye la activación masiva de las NSCs producida por las convulsiones epilépticas. Al someter a ratones a un modelo alternativo de epilepsia, actuando en la amígdala, comprobamos que las NSCs también se dividen más y se transforman en React-NSCs, demostrando que las NSCs se ven afectadas independientemente del sitio de origen de las convulsiones. Estos resultados muestran cómo en condiciones de hiperexcitación neuronal severa las NSCs contribuyen a la gliosis reactiva, lo que puede empeorar el pronóstico de la epilepsia, y que el receptor LPA1 participa en esta nueva función de las NSCs

MUTEX: Learning Unified Policies from Multimodal Task Specifications

Humans use different modalities, such as speech, text, images, videos, etc., to communicate their intent and goals with teammates. For robots to become better assistants, we aim to endow them with the ability to follow instructions and understand tasks specified by their human partners. Most robotic policy learning methods have focused on one single modality of task specification while ignoring the rich cross-modal information. We present MUTEX, a unified approach to policy learning from multimodal task specifications. It trains a transformer-based architecture to facilitate cross-modal reasoning, combining masked modeling and cross-modal matching objectives in a two-stage training procedure. After training, MUTEX can follow a task specification in any of the six learned modalities (video demonstrations, goal images, text goal descriptions, text instructions, speech goal descriptions, and speech instructions) or a combination of them. We systematically evaluate the benefits of MUTEX in a newly designed dataset with 100 tasks in simulation and 50 tasks in the real world, annotated with multiple instances of task specifications in different modalities, and observe improved performance over methods trained specifically for any single modality. More information at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/MUTEX/Comment: Accepted at 7th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2023), Atlanta, US

Pension expenditure in Spain: a European comparison

Rationale. There is significant disparity in the pension expenditure-to-GDP ratio across European countries. This article examines the size of the Spanish pension system relative to those of other EU countries and analyses the drivers behind the differences observed.Takeaways. • In 2019, pension expenditure in Spain, relative to the size of its economy, was above the EU’s simpleaverage and similar to the GDP-weighted average. • In comparison with the EU in 2019, the ageing process was less advanced in Spain and pensionscheme coverage was lower. In contrast, Spain had a lower employment rate and a higher level ofbenefits relative to the average wage. • Demographic projections suggest that pension expenditure in Spain will increase significantly. Slightlymore than 40% of this increase could be offset if Spain’s employment rate were to rise to equal that ofGermany