Luis Catela Nunes

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

We analyse the PISA-reported convergence in the performance of private and public schools in Portugal. When PISA sampling weights are used, the number of students enrolled in those types of schools and specific grades/tracks of study differs significantly from official population figures. To account for those differences, we apply a post-stratifica...

In this study, we use a discrete choice experiment to elicit the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for preventing and mitigating the effects of oil spills on marine and coastal ecosystem services, along a particularly vulnerable coastal region of mainland Portugal. We used a split-sample design to analyze the differences between two payment vehicles (PV): a...

This paper focuses on the territorial distribution of students, in Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA), with an immigrant background enrolling in the 3rd cycle of basic education in Portugal and on the differences in the academic performance of students attending the last year of this cycle, considering their birthplace. Differences are examined by esti...

We evaluate the demand and supply side effects of a policy which cuts funding to a significant portion of publicly funded private classes in Portugal, Contratos de Associação (AC), in which students do not pay tuition fees and are under the same admission criteria as in Public Schools – i.e., these private schools cannot select students based on th...

The purpose of this Policy Brief (work in progress, in Portuguese) is not to point out definitive solutions to the problem of teacher shortages, but to frame the existing scientific evidence on the subject.

This paper focuses on the territorial distribution of students, in Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA), with an immigrant background enrolling in the 3rd cycle of basic education in Portugal and on the differences in the academic performance of students attending the last year of this cycle, considering their birthplace. Differences are examined by esti...

Little is known about citizens’ judgment of nature conservation actions financed by public funds. The present work contributes to this topic with empirical evidence coming from a Choice Modeling (CM) study designed in an innovative mode. Using the participatory budget format, a CM exercise elicited respondents’ choice between the allocation of publ...

O Centro de Economia da Educação da Universidade Nova de Lisboa publicou recentemente um estudo que retrata a visão dos professores do ensino básico e secundário sobre o impacto da pandemia na aprendizagem dos alunos - http://bit.do/fRitZ. Os resultados indicaram uma preocupação generalizada, sobretudo nas escolas públicas, acerca dos atrasos nas a...

In Portugal, the covid-19 pandemic led to temporary school lockdowns and a generalized move to online teaching. This article uses data from a survey administered to teachers between March 2020 and January 2021 in three rounds of questionnaires. It shows that the pandemic affected public and private schools differently and led to increased inequalit...

In this study, we use PGIS to evaluate and map stakeholders' preferences for seven Marine and Coastal Ecosystem Services (MCES) in the Peniche-Nazaré region, located on the west coast of Portugal. We develop an alternative approach based on the Shannon index to identify conflict potential without questioning stakeholders directly about perceived co...

The beginnings of the Portuguese Escudo Monetary Zone (EMZ) in 1961, to promote the economic integration of Portugal and its empire, coincide in time with Mundell’s seminal paper about optimum currency areas. If non-optimality was the cause of the EMZ’s demise. This would suggest that monetary unions are fragile achievements, with little prospect f...

Many Mediterranean-type climates around the world will face increased risks of wildfires as a consequence of climate change. In this study we consider the case of Portugal and estimate the impact of the increasing risk of forest fires on tourism. Using data for 278 municipalities for the 2000–2016 period, we find a considerable negative impact of b...

In 2011, Portugal was subjected to one of the most stringent austerity packages implemented during the Eurozone crisis, a package known as the troika program. The interpretation of the effects of this program led to a vivid confrontation between two opposing views. A Keynesian view stressed the contractionary effect on the economy, well documented...

In many countries, students are selected into higher education institutions based on their achievement at high school, measured by scores given by their teachers and obtained on final national exams. This paper compares these two measures in terms of their ability to predict students' success in higher education. Accounting for sample selection pro...

Countries differ in their academic upper-secondary school systems whereby some require their students to choose a specialization track from a set of areas – typically natural sciences, economic sciences, or humanities – and follow that specialization for the course of their upper secondary education years whereas, by contrast, others follow a gener...

The use of counterfactual methods in the evaluation of policy interventions has been accepted today as the best approach in the estimation of a program’s performance. However, the simplest evaluations are often quite demanding in terms of the resources and the time needed to be implemented. In this article, we study the economic impact of a tourism...

In many countries entrance to Higher Education is determined by the performance of students in secondary school and/or the scores obtained in national exams. The relative weight of these two scores on the admission decision is a relevant policy topic, given its implication on who is admitted to university. The purpose of this paper is to investigat...

Creating liveable cities is a policy priority, especially for cities that are experiencing population loss. A decline in the number of inhabitants is commonly associated with low levels of residential satisfaction. However, such a supposition does not often find empirical support in shrinking cities. In the present study, we identify variables that...

High Nature Value (HNV) farmland is declining in the EU, with negative consequences for biodiversity conservation. Agri-environment schemes implemented under the Common Agricultural Policy have addressed this problem, with recent proposals advocating direct support to HNV farming systems. However, research is lacking on the economics of HNV farming...

The role of retention as an educational tool to overcome under-achievement is a hotly debated issue, especially given that the results in the literature are not consensual. The Portuguese case is particularly well suited to study this issue: all students must take standardized national exams at specific grades. Moreover, the available dataset track...

Using quarterly data from 1995 until 2014, we investigate whether Euro Area (EA) membership influences the probability of a European Union Member State going through an episode of sudden stop or through an episode of bonanza, after controlling for a number of push and pull factors. Overall, our results do not support the claim that EA membership co...

In this paper, we propose new tests of the presence of multiple breaks in the trend of a univariate time-series where the number and dates of the breaks are unknown and that are valid in the presence of stationary or unit root shocks. These tests can also be used to sequentially estimate the number of breaks. The behaviour of the proposed tests is...

The attractiveness of cities as places to live determines population movements into or out of them. Understanding the appealing features is fundamental to local governments, particularly for cities facing population decline. Pull and push attributes can include economic aspects, the availability of amenities and psychological constructs, initiating...

Cities facing a continued and prolonged process of population decline require innovative urban regeneration policies complementary to growth-oriented policies. Losing inhabitants involves a decrease in economic activity and social capital. Therefore citizens’ participation in defining policies to cope with population decline is being increasingly a...

The results of large-scale international assessments such as Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have attracted a considerable attention worldwide and are often used by policy-makers to support educational policies. To ensure that the published results represent the actual population, these surveys go through a thorough scrutiny t...

Following Hidalgo et al. (Sci Mag 317: 482–487, 2007), we use the structure of international trade to estimate a measure of “revealed relatedness” for each pair of internationally traded products, which intends to capture similarities in terms of the endowments or capabilities they use in production. Our method departs from the original one, in tha...

We propose a latent-class model (LCM) to analyze contingent-valuation surveys incorporating attitudinal questions capturing protest reasons to identify classes of respondents with similar preferences and attitudes. In contrast to a standard LCM, our model ensures that classes are not contaminated by different types of response biases. Using data re...

We propose a latent-class model (LCM) to analyze contingent-valuation surveys incorporating attitudinal questions capturing protest reasons to identify classes of respondents with similar preferences and attitudes. In contrast to a standard LCM, our model ensures that classes are not contaminated by different types of response biases. Using data re...

This paper contributes to the discussion of the effects of the publication of school rankings based on students' scores on national exams. We study the effectiveness of this (low-stakes) accountability mechanism. Our results suggest that the publication of rankings has clear effects upon families and schools in Portugal. After the rankings publicat...

The cork oak (Quercus suber L.) is harvested for its bark (cork), a highly valuable non-timber forest product. Recurrent cork harvesting is practiced over the lifetime of the tree and constitutes a stressful action that,while artificially promoting cork growth,may severely deplete tree vigor after an exploitation time span. To date, few long-term s...

This paper studies the effectiveness of Portuguese public schools' provision of 7th, 8th and 9th grades. At least two school types offer these grades: Basic and Secondary. Based on previous findings, a production function is estimated for 9th grade students in the regular academic track, including a variable that indicates the specific school type...

A Choice Modeling (CM) study was chosen to assess specific management actions related to bird-watching on the Portuguese island of Terceira in the Azores. The usual willingness-to-pay measure was replaced by the willingness-to-stay (WTS) longer on the island for bird-watching, given changes in the site attributes. Results of the valuation study wer...

Consumers’ food choices are influenced by a wide variety of credence attributes, but the food industry faces problems assessing whether the price premiums that consumers are willing to pay for these attributes will be sufficient to offset higher production costs. In this context, consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for safer, cleaner and animal fri...

One of the prevalent topics in the economic growth literature is the debate between neoclassical, semi‐endogenous, and endogenous growth theories regarding the model that best describes the data. An important part of this discussion can be summarized in three mutually exclusive hypotheses: the “constant trend,” the “level shift,” and the “slope shi...

The existence or nonexistence of changes in meat consumption cycles is critical to meat industry. If the change is existent, there is a need to understand what motivates the change to identify the most appropriate response. Wavelet analysis is considered here as a promising technique that may lead to a better understanding of characteristic pattern...

We develop a general econometric model of currency crises and contagion that integrates a number of important features appearing in many different models recently proposed in the literature. In particular, we consider a Markov regime switching vector autoregression conditional heteroskedastic model with time-varying transition probabilities allowin...

We contribute to the stated preference literature by addressing scale usage heterogeneity regarding how individuals answer attitudinal questions capturing lack of trust in institutions and fairness issues. Using a latent class model, we conduct a contingent valuation study to elicit the willingness-to-pay to preserve a recreational site. We …find e...

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion of the effects of published school rankings based on average scores obtained by students on national exams. We study the effectiveness of this (low-stakes) accountability mechanism; we analyze whether students react to these rankings, by moving in or out of high-schools according to their...

Internet is an increasingly used tool opening a new era of communication. These opportunities are progressively adopted in SP studies. Little consideration has been given to its potential influence on sample composition and on how preferences are formed and stated. In Praia da Vitória bay, located in Terceira Island, in Azores archipelago, Choice M...

The measurement of market risk poses major challenges to researchers and different economic agents. On one hand, it is by now widely recognized that risk varies over time. On the other hand, the risk profile of an investor, in terms of investment horizon, makes it crucial to also assess risk at the frequency level. We propose a novel approach to me...

The assessment of alternative forest management strategies should account not only for the private benefits to forest landowners but also for the ecological, environmental and economic benefits valued by society. There are a number of empirical valuation methods that may contribute to that assessment. These methods involve several steps: data acqui...

In recent decades, life expectancy in developed countries has risen to historically unprecedented levels driven by unforeseen declines in rates of mortality. The prospects of further reductions are of fundamental importance in various areas. In this context, we consider the problem of forecasting future mortality and life expectancy in the event of...

This article proposes tests for seasonal unit roots allowing for the presence of a break in the trend slope occurring at an unknown date. In particular, new LM-type tests are derived based on the framework introduced by Hylleberg et al. (1990). Null asymptotic distributions are derived for the no break case as well as when a break is present in the...

Pharmaceutical spending in many countries has seen a steep increase in recent years. Governments have adopted several measures to reduce pharmaceutical expenditure growth, ranging from increased co-payments to price decreases determined administratively. Promotion of generic consumption has also ranked high in political priorities. We adopt a novel...

This article develops a latent class model for estimating willingness-to-pay for public goods using simultaneously contingent valuation (CV) and attitudinal data capturing protest attitudes related to the lack of trust in public institutions providing those goods. A measure of the social cost associated with protest responses and the consequent los...

The assessment of the comovement among international stock markets is of key interest, for example, for the international portfolio diversification literature. In this paper, we re-examine such comovement by resorting to a novel approach, wavelet analysis. Wavelet analysis allows one to measure the comovement in the time-frequency space. In this wa...

Pharmaceutical spending in many other countries has had a steep increase in the last decade. The Portuguese Government has adopted several measures to reduce pharmaceutical expenditure growth, ranging from increased co-payments to price decreases determined administratively. Promotion of generic consumption has also ranked high in political priorit...

This paper consists of an empirical study comparing a dynamic factor model approach to estimate the current quarter aggregate GDP with the alternative approach of aggregating the forecasts obtained from specific dynamic factor models for each major expenditure disaggregate. The out-of-sample forecasting performance results suggest that there is no...

In this study, we assess the credibility of the currency board arrangement (CBA) of the Macau Special Administrative Region by studying the relationship between exchange market pressure (EMP) and the anchors of a rule-based CBA, namely, interest rate arbitrage, exchange rate arbitrage and economic discipline. A pure CBA signals its credibility by a...

This paper estimates WTP for drinking water quality in Brazil by combining averting behavior with contingent valuation data. Using bivariate probit models, alternative structures allowing for heteroscedasticity between and within data sources are incorporated by taking advantage of the different information content that characterizes each data sour...

In this paper we study the determinants of inflows of foreign capital in Latin American countries. We consider the usual factors included in other studies in the literature: market size, infrastructure development, and wages. To obtain a improved measure of market size we adjust GDP by a poverty factor. In addition, we consider indicators of openne...

This paper presents an extension of the Stock and Watson coincident indicator model that allows one to include variables available at different frequencies while taking care of missing observations at any time period. The proposed procedure provides estimates of the unobserved common coincident component, of the unobserved monthly series underlying...

The aim of this paper is to build monthly coincident and leading composite indicators for the euro area growth cycle. In contrast with previous literature, where the variables to be included in the composite indicators are chosen according to their overall comovement with the reference cycle, we resort to frequency domain analysis to achieve additi...

We consider LM-type tests for a unit root allowing for a break in trend at an unknown date. In addition to the minimum LM test statistic, we propose new LM-type tests based on the least squares estimator of the break date under the null. We examine asymptotic behavior under the null hypothesis with and without a break. For all the endogenous break...

In contrast to previous literature, we propose a consistency test that does not impose any particular common functional form for the preference structure underlying the travel cost (TC) and contingent valuation (CV) models. We derive testable consistency conditions between TC and CV data in the context of mixed demand systems when valuing changes i...

It took ten years and two Prime Ministers (right then left) to make Portugal a founding member of the eurozone. The efforts of successive duos of five ministers of finance and three central bank governors were required and the euro conversion rate was set at 200 escudos, some 16 per cent lower than the rate at which the escudo entered the ECU baske...

For Portugal, the transition to the Euro began in September 1989 and featured three successive institutional arrangements related to the Exchange Rate Mechanism of the European Monetary System: shadowing it, belonging to it with 6% and then with 15% fluctuation bands. Using daily data, we study how the degree of mean reversion of the exchange rate...

This study addresses some modelling questions related to the possibility of structural change in models with nonstationary variables. Focusing on cointegration issues, some methodological aspects are discussed, attempting to integrate coherently the several steps of the modelling strategy. These range from unit root to cointegration testing and to...

This paper focuses on Bayesian Vector Auto-Regressive (BVAR) models for the euro area. A modified hyperparameterization scheme based on the Minnesota prior that takes into account the economic nature of the variables in the model is used. The merits of incorporating long-run relationships are also discussed. Alternative methods to estimate eventual...

In a RPL model, rather than imposing consistency with consumer theory by constraining the distribution of the price coefficient to have negative support, a more general procedure is developed. Non-consistent choice behavior is identified in a recreation demand model for game reserves in South Africa.

This paper is an empirical application that combines averting behavior with contingent valuation data. Consistency tests are performed incorporating alternative heteroscedastic structures in the bivariate probit models by taking advantage of the different information content that characterizes each data source. We look at three covariates not yet e...

In this paper, we show that, when combining revealed (RP) and stated (SP) data, for marginal changes in quality of environmental goods, rationality implies consistency, as the consistency conditions coincide with a subset of the conditions for rationality.

When the 1987 general elections brought a durable government to Portugal, the national environment was still inflationary. Nevertheless, thanks to the efforts of successive ministers of finance/central bank governor pairs, the criteria for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) were met and the seventh pair saw the euro conversion rate be set at 200 esc...

This study addresses some modeling questions related to the possibility of structural change in models with non-stationary variables. Focusing on cointegration issues, some methodological aspects ere discussed, attempting to integrate coherently the several steps of the modelling strategy. These range from unit to cointegration testing and to testi...

In the context of an estimated RPL (Random Parameters Logit) choice model of recreational demand for the game reserves of the KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, a test on the existence of an underlying rational preference structure is presented. The proposed procedure allows to identify nonrational behavior in the sample. Using two different d...

When working with micro data on consumer demand, there are many different situations where decisions involve only discrete choices. In this context, conditions under which an underlying rational preference structure exists are derived. Moreover, by introducing flexibility into the model, it is possible to identify nonrational behavior in the sample...

C. R. Nelson and C. I. Plosser (1982), in a classic paper, failed to find strong evidence against the null hypothesis of a generating process with a unit autoregressive root for thirteen U.S. macroeconomic time series. P. Perron (1989) claimed that such evidence was available for a majority of these series if the alternative hypothesis was of trend...

This paper considers the problem of choosing the number of breaks in the mean or trend of a series. We take the Schwarz-Bayesian criterion (SBC) which can be considered either as a proxy or as an alternative for what might be inferred from visual inspection of the graph of a time series. We show that spuriously many breaks will be inferred when the...

This paper contributes empirically to our understanding of informed traders. It analyzes traders' characteristics in a foreign exchange electronic limit order market via anonymous trader identities. We use six indicators of informed trading in a cross-sectional multivariate approach to identify traders with high price impact. More information is co...

On-site surveys are frequently used in empirical recreation demand studies. Several authors have already addressed the consequences of using this kind of samples for the estimation of count data models. However, the consequences of using on-site samples when estimating a binary choice model have been neglected in the literature. We show that the us...

In this paper we develop the first procedure which delivers tests for the presence of common broken trends in multivariate time series which do not require knowledge of the form of serial correlation in the data and are robust as to whether the shocks are stationary, non stationary, cointegrated or not cointegrated. The setup is a VAR process for c...