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• We study the level of intergenerational transmission of democratic values eliciting preferences for social choice rules that aggregate individual preferences into a collective decision. • This is relevant because a high intergenerational transmission of democratic values would increase the stability of political institutions. • We run an experiment with 186 students and their parents and elicit their preferences in three different profiles. We estimate a panel data discrete choice model. • Our results indicate a significant intergenerational transmission of preferences for social choice rules. We study whether democratic values that govern the preferences over social choice rules are subject to intergenerational transmission. We focus on five social choice rules, namely, Plurality, Plurality with Runoff, the Majoritarian Compromise, Borda Rule and Social Compromise, that represent very diverse values about how to extract public will out of individual opinions. In our experiment, students and their parents are confronted with hypothetical preference profiles and are asked to decide which alternative should be chosen for the society. The design of the hypothetical preference profiles allows us to interpret a subject's choice of an alternative as her revealed preference for one of the focused social choice rules. We find significant differences between the rules most often chosen by the parents (Majoritarian Compromise and Plurality) and those by the students (Social Compromise). Analyzing the relation between the preferences over social choice rules for each parent-offspring pair, we find support for the hypothesis of parental transmission of preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the net effect of renewable energy policy in Spain from 2002 to 2017 and calculates its cost-effectiveness in terms of CO 2 emission reductions in the production of electricity. Our conclusions indicate that although the phasing out of Feed-in Tariffs reduced the regulatory costs, it also limited renewable participation in the electricity market, leading to an increased electricity price and higher emissions. According to our results, the joint effect of (i) the value of avoided emissions due to renewable energy participation and (ii) the merit order effect was able to compensate for the regulatory costs (subsidies) up until 2010, while the sign of the net effect was reversed from 2011 to 2017. Finally, we find that the economic implications of emission reductions are highly dependent on how the social cost of carbon is measured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper uses subjects’ diverse self-reported justifications to explain discrepancies between observed heterogeneous behavior and the unique equilibrium prediction in a one-shot traveler''s dilemma experiment. Principal components analysis suggests that iterative reasoning, aspiration levels, competitive behavior, attitudes towards risk and penalties and focal points may be behind different choices. Such reasons are coherent with same subjects’ behavior in other tests and experiments in which these particular issues are prominent, and thus, we identify “types” of subjects. Overall, we conclude that subjects’ self-justifications in complex strategic situations contain informational value which may be used to predict behavior in other situations of economic importance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Feedback is an important component of assessment in learning environments, because it constitutes a new learning opportunity which is not usually available in most eLearning systems. Feedback allows students to know their learning flaws and helps teachers to design learning contents adapted to the needs of the students. Semantic Web technologies have been applied in recent years with different purposes in Education, but their applications for generating useful feedback have not been researched enough so far. In this paper we present an approach for generating feedback to open questions in assessment tests, by making use of ontologies and semantic annotations. The feedback is generated by obtaining the semantic similarity between the annotations associated with both questions and students’ answers. The method has been implemented as an extension of our online assessment platform. Its application in a real course is also presented and discussed here. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The role played by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is more and more important in the development of the society and, consequently, the Education. ICT provide new representation languages that allow the development of new learning scenarios, and the educative institutions must know and use such new technologies for improving their processes. In this sense, ontologies and semantic web technologies constitute appropriate technologies for knowledge management in educational settings as it has been demonstrated in recent years. In this paper, we present a system that has been developed with teachers of a Secondary School that uses ontologies to support the development and management of the educative curriculum. We will describe both the functionality of the system and how the semantic technologies have been smoothly included into the Gescur platform. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We provide empirical evidence to support the claims that social diversity promotes prosocial behavior. We elicit a real-life social network and its members’ adherence to a social norm, namely inequity aversion. The data reveal a positive relationship between subjects’ prosociality and several measures of centrality. This result is in line with the theoretical literature that relates the evolution of social norms to the structure of social interactions and argues that central individuals are crucial for the emergence of prosocial behavior. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]