For several decades, researchers have focused on dropout in search for an explanation and prevention of this phenomenon. However, past research is characterized by methodological shortcomings. Most of this research was conducted without considering the hierarchical structure of educational data...

Urban competitiveness aids local development by encouraging the exploitation of opportunities for economic development and by enhancing overall performance. Previous studies have evaluated urban competitiveness primarily from an economic perspective and few studies have considered locational...

Multilevel growth curve models for repeated measures data have become increasingly popular and stand as a flexible tool for investigating longitudinal change in students’ outcome variables. In addition, these models allow the estimation of school effects on students’ outcomes though making...

Multilevel growth curve models are becoming invaluable in educational research because they model changes in student outcomes efficiently. The coding of the time variable in these models plays a crucial role as illustrated in this study for the case of a three-level quadratic growth curve model....

Because labor quality changes over the business cycle,the cyclicality of aggregate wages cannot reflect the true cyclical behavior of the price of labor inputs. To control for changes in labor quality, many researchers have examined the cyclical behavior of the price of labor inputs using...

Greenhouse gas reduction and energy consumption are becoming two important issues in both industrialized and developing countries, and policy makers are developing means to reduce total domestic energy use. We evaluate and compare the direct and the indirect energy consumption both in the...

Environmental concerns lead industries to implement gasified biomass (syngas) as a promising fuel in steel reheating furnaces. The impurities of syngas as well as a combination with iron oxide scale form complex mixtures with low melting points, and might cause corrosion on steel slabs. In this...

Zn(1-x)GaxO thin films (x = 0.01, 0.03, 0.05, 0.07 named as GZO1, GZO2, GZO3, GZO4, respectively) were deposited on glass substrates by RF magnetron sputtering. The crystal structure, electrical, thermoelectric and magneto-thermoelectric properties of GZO films were investigated. It is found...