Bilingualism was implemented in the Community of Madrid (Spain) more than ten years ago, through the incorporation of the English language in the teaching methods of certain schools. Since that time, various research projects have been carried out, with the objective of comparing the academic performance of students in bilingual schools with those in nonbilingual schools. The present paper makes use of primary education data from the Department of Education and Research for the Community of Madrid in an effort to analyze whether or not bilingualism results in the relative improvement of educational outcomes achieved in primary schools in the Region of Madrid, in Spain. More specifically, the data used is from sixth grade classrooms, given that, generally speaking, in this grade all schools give a standardized test which measures academic performance in Math, Science and Technology, Spanish Language Arts and English Language Arts. Our assessment makes use of a multinomial logit model, and includes the most common variables found in the research on the determination of educational outcomes (variables related to whether or not schools are bilingual, which is the main focus of this paper), as well as other less common variables considered to be relevant. These include absenteeism, satisfaction levels among families and students, and the percentage of students in second chance programs. The results show that bilingualism does not lower children performance in the subjects taught in English or in the subjects taught in Spanish. Academic performance in Mathematics, Science and Technology, and Spanish Language Arts is similar with respect to those schools which are not bilingual. However, results in English are significantly higher in bilingual schools when compared to non-bilingual schools.

The aim of this work is to design a multiobjective model to explain the behavior among military expenditures (MEs), the human development index, and the global peace index in countries belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for the study period 2008–2016. In order to solve this problem, different decision variables have been considered: health expenditure, education expenditure, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), collected taxes, public debt, and R&D costs, which are related to health, education, and economic sectors. To determine the relationships among decision variables making up the objective functions and model constraints, different panel data models were estimated. The obtained results show that the major part of the NATO countries present a behavior which differs from what is efficient. In this context, this work highlights the path to follow by each country, such as the implementation of public budget policies in the health and education sectors, and for collected taxes and public debt, to achieve efficient solutions.

The leverage effect is one of the most relevant stylized facts to modelling time-varying financial volatility because the effect that negative returns has on volatility is different to that produced by positive returns. For this reason, this paper focuses on two goals: (i) to analyse the main stylized facts of volatility using 20 indexes from the most important stock markets in Asia, Europe, North America and South America in the sample period, namely between January 3, 2000 and February 4, 2014; and, (ii) to estimate conditional heteroskedasticity using the classic econometric models typically used for this purpose (AGARCH, GJR-GARCH, EGARCH, APARCH) along with the symmetric (ARSV) and asymmetric (TA-ARSV) stochastic volatility models, and then to compare their results to determine which model best explains the main stylized facts of financial returns. The results show, on the one hand, that financial returns have the same characteristic features, regardless of the particular stock market and, on the other hand, that the TA-ARSV is the best model to explain the stylized facts.