Laura López-Torres

• PhD. Business Economics
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Alcalá

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 interac...

Over the last few decades, public programs have driven the gradual adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education. The most ambitious project in Spain so far was Escuela 2.0, which provided students from the regions that opted into the program with laptops. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of this pr...

This paper tests whether competition and collaboration as well as a broad range of other factors lead to improved efficiency in the UK independent school sector. These schools have always operated in a competitive environment, but collaborative groupings are also observed. To answer our main aim, a robust conditional efficiency estimation is employ...

This paper proposes an extension of the non-parametric long-term evaluation of efficiency, the conditional panel data DEA model, which takes into account the panel structure of the data and, at the same time, incorporates the role of contextual factors in the estimations. Its application to the education sector for the period analyzed (2009–2014) s...

This paper provides evidence on the effectiveness in the implementation of an educational program which offered public schools in Catalonia (Spain) the opportunity to improve the quality of educational provision. We employ a difference-in-differences approach on rich balanced panel data of public schools. The results confirm that the program did ef...

The economic crisis forced politicians to make public finances sustainable. The education sector was one of the most adversely affected by control of public expenditure. This paper analyzes the drivers causing productivity changes of especially vulnerable public schools during the crisis. We use the Hicks-Moorsteen index, which is a seldom applied...

This paper provides evidence on strategic interaction among public schools. We adopt a two-stage estimation procedure to assess whether competition among public schools influences demand for places. A robust conditional order-m approach is used to estimate the efficiency of each school; a spatial econometric framework is then applied to disentangle...

Centralized resource allocation requires planning how to implement changes in order to adapt resources to the allocated budget without losing outputs. This paper presents an alternative model to reallocate human resources in a public education network based on the so-called centralized data envelopment analysis. This stream has received less attent...

This paper provides an extensive overview of the literature on efficiency in education. It summarizes the earlier applied inputs, outputs and contextual variables, as well as the used data sources of papers in the field of efficiency in education. Moreover, it reviews the papers on education that applied methodologies as data envelopment analysis,...

The literature states that an unfavourable environment negatively affects students’ performance. However, there is evidence showing that low socio-economic status does not always have a negative influence on students’ outcomes. To shed some light on this issue, we develop a conditional order-m efficiency estimation. The results confirm that the env...

The accession of Poland and nine other countries into the structures of the European Union in May 2004 resulted in their airspaces being covered by the Open Skies agreement. Deregulation and the entry of low cost carriers into these markets contributed to a dynamic growth in air traffic, which most strongly influenced the operations and development...

The accession of Poland and nine other countries into the structures of the European Union in May 2004 resulted in their airspaces being covered by the Open Skies agreement. Deregulation and the entry of low cost carriers into these markets contributed to a dynamic growth in air traffic, which most strongly influenced the operations and development...

This paper analyzes the level of “technical” quality public schools and determines whether or not there are discrepancies between this indicator and parents’ subjective perception of quality. A sample of public schools in Catalonia is surveyed. The results show that parents correctly perceive the technical quality. Furthermore, there is a significa...

The objective of this research is to analyse from a resource-based theory the companies' resources and capabilities that condition intrapreneurship. The study uses a logistic regression analysis and a specific database on intrapreneurship from the 2008 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), which includes 24,304 observations from 10 countries. The...