Daniel Santín

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to investigate whether crowd valuations have become a good estimator of public information for transfer fees (TF) in line with an active and efficient market. Design/methodology/approach: To do this, we explain market values (MVs) and TF of football players from five major leagues over 5 years (2020–2024), including personal characteristics, performance and popularity variables and bargaining power when transferring football players. Findings: The article shows that negotiation variables significantly influence the final transfer fee during the bargaining process and are also collected by crowd valuations after the transfer. We also found that MVs at the beginning of the year, in which a football player is transferred, are a better indicator of the TF finally paid than the previous TF. Originality/value: This study marks a pioneering effort in presenting evidence on how crowd valuations capture the bargaining process of prices, aligning with the theory of market efficiency. These findings hold significant importance for accounting regulators, the Union of European Football Associations and football club managers. They shed light on the potential and challenges associated with utilizing football player crowd valuations as a complementary source of information in regular financial reports of football clubs regarding player transfer prices.

This paper shows that schools can foster the transmission of civic virtues by helping students to develop concrete, democratically chosen, collective projects. We draw on a RCT implemented in 200 middle schools in three countries. The program leads students to conduct citizenship projects in their communities under the supervision of teachers trained in the intervention. The intervention caused a decline in absenteeism and disciplinary sanctions at school, alongside improved academic achievement. It also led students to diversify their friendship network. The program has stronger effects when implemented by teachers who are initially more involved in the life of the school.

In the realm of assessing scale efficiency (SE), it tends to be computed as a firm‐specific phenomenon rather than something associated with the whole shape of the frontier of the technology under evaluation. This circumstance may lead to inaccuracies in the conclusions drawn regarding the returns to scale (RTS) exhibited across the entire frontiers since they can be biased by the location of the observations. This paper addresses this gap by defining the notion of global SE measured through projecting synthetic observations randomly generated within a unit‐hypercube against the technologies under constant and variable RTS. Our approach enables the comparison of the local SE exhibited by each firm in relation to the global expected percentage of production points that display a similar type of RTS across the production frontier. The approach is illustrated through a numerical example and applied to a set of hospitals in Spain.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the benefits of the university department merger undertaken by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) in 2017. The merger led to a new structure in which the original 184 departments were reduced to 97. To do this, we use the data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the efficiency gains of a merger process decomposing efficiency into three savings effects: learning, harmony, and scale effects. They decomposed efficiency into three savings effects: learning, harmony, and scale effects. Additionally, we introduce a new regulatory effect, which accounts for other potential recursive savings not included in the DEA analysis. Our results suggest that the merger process undertaken by the UCM achieved savings of around 20.5 million euros, approximately 6.6 million euros, which is accounted for by the regulatory effect. These savings will reproduce and accumulate annually over time. The results also show that, as a result of the intense negotiations, academic staff based at faculties engaged in the merger process may have taken more days of sick leave than academics from unmerged faculties in 2017, although the increase is not significant at standard levels.

La pandemia del COVID-19 llevó a la población española a un confinamiento obligatorio entre los meses de marzo y mayo de 2020. Ello supuso cerrar los centros educativos y continuar el resto del curso 2019-2020 sin presencialidad. Este trabajo analiza cómo se desarrolló el proceso educativo durante el confinamiento y estima el impacto que la interacción entre la educación telemática y la situación laboral de los progenitores tuvo sobre la competencia de pensamiento crítico del alumnado. Para ello, utilizamos datos recogidos al principio y al final del curso 2019-2020 sobre el pensamiento crítico del alumnado de 3º ESO de 15 centros educativos de la Comunidad de Madrid. En primer lugar, concluimos que los centros públicos tuvieron mayores dificultades que los centros concertados para continuar con el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Para seguir las clases telemáticas, el 70% del alumnado en centros concertados disponían de un ordenador de sobremesa o portátil, frente a solo un 40% del alumnado en centros públicos. Además, mientras que el 73% del alumnado de centros concertados destinaron más de 4 horas en total a clases y tareas online, esta cifra solo superó ligeramente el 50% en el alumnado de centros públicos. En segundo lugar, y con carácter general, las diferentes situaciones laborales de padres y madres no tuvieron efectos significativos sobre el pensamiento crítico del alumnado. Sin embargo, encontramos que, para el alumnado con resultados académicos por debajo de la media a principio de curso, el hecho de que la madre teletrabajara durante el cierre escolar tuvo un impacto positivo y significativo sobre sus resultados. Ello sugiere que el teletrabajo permitió a las madres brindar mayor apoyo y supervisión a sus hijos e hijas con bajo rendimiento previo.