Methods for measuring school performance through cohort analysis

In order to evaluate the main educational characteristics of a grade cohort—which are the proportion of those who get a degree, the average time spent in school and finally the mean educational attainment of the cohort—we present a school system in which repeat enrolments are well identified. In this discrete model, we present, for each grade, three transition coefficients: the proportion of those passing to the next grade, the proportion of those repeating the grade and the proportion of those leaving the school system. Afterwards, we set up a system of equations leading to the distribution of the entrants in the cohort according to the levels of their educational attainment, a system of equations for which a simple solution will depend on two assumptions.     

Trip packing in petrol stations replenishment

This paper considers a generalized version of the trip packing problem that we encountered as a sub-problem of the petrol stations replenishment problem. In this version we have to assign a number of trips to a fleet composed of a limited number of non-identical tank-trucks. Each trip has a specific duration, working time of vehicles is limited and the net revenue of each trip depends on the truck used. The paper provides a mathematical formulation of the problem and proposes some construction, improvement and neighbourhood search solution heuristics. A set of benchmark problem instances is created in a way that reflects real-life situations and used to analyse the performance of the proposed heuristics. A real-life case is also used to further assess the proposed heuristics.     

An ordinal approach to the study of intergenerational opportunities for standard of living: the case of Latin America

This paper looks at the intergenerational transmission of opportunities for standard of living in Latin America. It proposes to study this question on the basis of an ordinal approach. This ordinal approach borrows recent ideas on the way to compare opportunity sets, that is, to rank matrices giving, for example, the distribution of individuals by level of education of their parents and the standard of living (income) of the group to which they belong. Such comparisons are based on the use of the concepts of rank and Generalized Lorenz Dominance. The empirical illustration is based on the data of the 2006 Latinobarómetro survey which covered 18 Latin American countries and the standard of living of individuals (children) was derived from an algorithm allowing one to compute the order of acquisition of durable goods and access to services.     

Statistical Estimation for a Class of Self‐Regulating Processes

Self‐regulating processes are stochastic processes whose local regularity, as measured by the pointwise Hölder exponent, is a function of amplitude. They seem to provide relevant models for various signals arising for example in geophysics or biomedicine. We propose in this work an estimator of the self‐regulating function (that is, the function relating amplitude and Hölder regularity) of the self‐regulating midpoint displacement process and study some of its properties. We prove that it is almost surely convergent and obtain a central limit theorem. Numerical simulations show that the estimator behaves well in practice.