Facultad de Económicas y CC Empresariales

This paper reflects on the importance of employability skills for higher education students in the present and future working environment to determine the impact these skills may have on student competitiveness and satisfaction. The study focused on university students in the Madrid region during their final academic year who participated in a teaching activity that launched real business challenges. We created a model that analyzed the impact of employability skills on student competitiveness and satisfaction and the mediating role of competitiveness in two different moments (before and during the COVID-19 pandemic). Empirical findings suggest that students' improved employability skills increased their competitiveness and satisfaction, with competitiveness as a mediating factor. Thus, academic authorities must focus on students acquiring employability skills, which are among the most valuable in the labour market and positively impact student competitiveness and satisfaction. This way, future graduates can work successfully in a changing and demanding world and find positions aligned with their training. In contrast to some studies that place the teacher as the research target, ours focused on the student and the impact these skills have on the variables mentioned.

Este trabajo analiza la importancia que tiene la creación de un marco de integración generacional en las empresas que están abordando, o van a abordar, procesos de transformación digital del negocio. La transformación digital ha revolucionado los modelos empresariales y ha impregnado todas sus estrategias relacionadas con empleados, clientes y stakeholders. Su impacto en los negocios es de tal magnitud que, más que nunca, se hace imprescindible poner en el centro de la actividad tecnológica a las personas y crear los entornos necesarios para que nadie pueda ser excluido del proceso de implantación digital, especialmente aquellas que, por su edad, pueden ser víctimas de una brecha digital que les expulse del sistema productivo. Es imprescindible crear un marco de capacitación digital que integre a las diferentes generaciones en torno a los procesos de implantación tecnológica y favorezca la inclusión social y laboral de las generaciones más vulnerables frente a la transformación digital, potenciando habilidades y competencias digitales que les permitan participar del cambio tecnológico sin quedar segregadas de la actividad laboral por incompetencia digital.

In 1962, the Ley de Bases para la Ordenación del Crédito y de la Banca (LBOCB) was passed, which sought, at least theoretically, to introduce greater competition in the Spanish banking sector. After more than a century, the banking sector was forced to specialize and to choose between the provision of commercial services (the raising of short-term deposits and loans and discounting of bills) or the financing of industrial activities (typical of industrial banking). The sector, characterized by the presence of a multitude of small and medium-sized banks, presented oligopolistic features as more than 80% of the resources were in the hands of the large national banks. The aim of this paper is to characterize the activity of Spanish banks in 1955 and 1965. By means of a multicriteria analysis, a classification of the banks according to different parameters is proposed, with the aim of contrasting whether the banking strategy was similar or not. This work is framed in the tradition of the New Economic History or Cliometrics developed in the 70's of the 20th century, characterized by the interconnection of mathematics, economics, and statistics in the historical analysis.

En 1962 se aprobaba la Ley de Bases para la Ordenación del Crédito y de la Banca. La finalidad de la nueva ley era acabar con el statu quo bancario, liberalizando el sector y forzando su especialización. Desde un punto de vista de la historia bancaria este período se ha investigado muy profusamente. Sin embargo, estos estudios se han centrado fundamentalmente en el comportamiento del mercado nacional, sin tener en cuenta que el mer cado relevante en el que compiten los bancos privados es el regional y/o el local. La casi inexistencia de datos desagregados por provincias de los balances de la banca privada española para ese período explicaría este hecho. La presente investigación analiza la evolución de la concentración bancaria entre 1963 y 1975 en todas las provincias españolas, con el objetivo de determinar en qué medida el cambio institucional del año 1962 modificó la estructura de estos mercados.

Unemployment is one of the main problems facing today's economies. In the context of the European Union, it is the Mediterranean economies that have traditionally shown a less favorable evolution of unemployment. This paper presents an explanatory model of the evolution of unemployment in two of these Mediterranean economies, Greece, and Spain, since the launching of the European Monetary Union. These were two of the European economies hardest hit by the Great Recession of 2008 and subsequently by the pandemic in 2020, so it is interesting to study which economic factors would explain the evolution of their unemployment rates. For this purpose, economic variables such as GDP pc, the output gap, investment, deficit, the employment rate by educational levels, inflation, labour productivity, labour force and public spending as a percentage of GDP. On the other hand, it is interesting to note to what extent Greece and Spain have or have not shown similar patterns of behavior of their labour markets so far this century, and what kind of economic policy measures could be put in place to ensure that both countries cease to have one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU. Finally, it will be analyzed how they have been affected by the Great Recession and the covid health crisis.

Since their creation in the mid-19th century, savings banks have played a crucial role in the Spanish economy, not only at the national level but also regionally and locally. These centuries-old institutions have deep roots in the municipalities and provinces where they offered their services. From the beginning of the 20th century, they became significant competitors to private banks. Recognizing that the working classes, traditional customers of the savings banks, would be key to their development in the medium term, private banks established their own savings sections. In this context, the Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Madrid, during Franco's regime—a period financially dominated by private banks—managed to capture a large portion of the savings resources in the province of Madrid and positioned itself alongside the major national banks of the era. What strategy did it employ during a period characterized by significant legislative changes aimed at increasing competition in the sector? How did a savings bank manage to compete on an equal footing with the powerful national banks of Franco's regime? These are the main questions this article aims to answer.

One of the main concerns facing societies today is unemployment, although its evolution is not the same in all economies. Moreover, it is one of the variables that can not only delay but also prevent real convergence between the Member States of the European Union. This is the reason why it is necessary to know the determinants of the evolution of the unemployment rate. The aim of this paper is to present an explanatory model of unemployment since the beginning of the 21st century in two Mediterranean economies, Greece and Cyprus, which have important historical, cultural and economic ties. The identification of variables that may influence unemployment makes it possible to determine wheth er the response of the Greek and Cypriot authorities to reduce it has been adequate.

Dams are essential structures in the growth of a region due to their ability to store large amounts of water and manage it for different social activities, mainly for human consumption. The study of the structural behavior of dams during their useful life is a fundamental factor for their safety. In terms of structural monitoring, classic terrestrial techniques are usually costly and require much time. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) technology through the persistent scatterer interferometry (PSI) technique has been widely applied to measure millimeter displacements of a dam crest. In this context, this paper presents an investigation about the structural monitoring of the crest of the Sanalona dam in Mexico, applying two geodetic satellite techniques and mathematical modeling to extract the risk of the dam–reservoir system. The applicability of the InSAR technique for monitoring radial displacements in dams is evaluated and compared with both GPS systems and an analytical model based on the finite element method (FEM). The radial displacements of the Sanalona dam follow a seasonal pattern derived from the reservoir level, reaching maximum radial magnitudes close to 13 mm in November when the rainy season ends. GPS recorded and FEM simulated maximum displacements of 7.3 and 6.7 mm, respectively. InSAR derived radial displacements, and the reservoir water level presented a high similarity with a correlation index equal to 0.8. In addition, it was found that the Sanalona dam presents the greatest deformation in the central zone of the crest. On the other hand, based on the reliability analysis, the probability of failure values lower than 8.3 10􀀀2 was obtained when the reservoir level was maximum, which means that the radial displacements did not exceed the limit states of the dam–reservoir system in the evaluated period. Finally, the extracted values of the probability of failure demonstrated that the Sanalona dam does not represent a considerable risk to society.

In this paper the Standardized Precipitation Conversion Index (SPCI), a PWV-based drought index, has been computed using GNSS and ERA5 PWV and its performance has been tested with respect to the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) in Southern Spain. One of the climatic features of this area is the low correlation level between PWV and precipitation, in contrast with other areas in which SPCI has been previously tested. The GNSS-SPCI has been derived from validated ZTD time series estimated from local GNSS permanent stations’ data. All the needed meteorological values were derived from ERA5, excepting precipitation values and SPEI-SPI values which were extracted from a national high-resolution dataset. The resulting SPCI time series have shown high correlation coefficients with respect to the SPEI. The use of longer SPCI time series allowed by ERA5 model has provided the most coherent results, suggesting that the ERA5-PWV data can be interesting to overcome problems caused by the short timespan of GNSS time series in SPCI computation. In general, high correlation coefficients have been obtained compared to global results from previous studies. This shows that, even for regions with low correlation levels between PWV and precipitation, the SPCI can have an interesting potential for drought monitoring. The SPCI was found to perform better on higher timescales (12 and 24 months). The performance of SPCI has also been compared that of the SPI: SPCI is able to outperform SPI for the 24-month timescale for a limited geographical region. This supports that the inclusion of PWV data in drought monitoring indices could be promising and is worth keeping to be investigated

Aiding the ground cellular network with aerial base stations carried by drones has experienced an intensive raise of interest in the past years. Reconfigurable air-to-ground channels enable aerial stations to enhance users’ access links by means of seeking good line-of-sight connectivity while hovering in the air. In this article, we propose an analytical framework for the 3D placement of a fleet of coordinated drone relays. This framework optimizes network performance in terms of user throughput fairness, expressed through the 𝛼-fairness metric. The optimization problem is formulated as a mixed-integer non-convex program, which is intractable. Hence, we propose an extremal-optimization-based algorithm, Parallelized Alpha-fair Drone Deployment (PADD), which solves the problem online, in low-degree polynomial time. We evaluate our proposal by means of numerical simulations over the real topology of a dense city. We discuss the advantages of integrating drone relay stations in current networks and test several resource scheduling approaches in both static and dynamic scenarios, including with progressively larger and denser crowds.