Does mixed frequency vector error correction model add relevant information to exchange misalignment calculus? Evidence for United States

Real exchange rate is an important macroeconomic price in the economy and a ects economic activity, interest rates, domestic prices, trade and investiments ows among other variables. Methodologies have been developed in empirical exchange rate misalignment studies to evaluate whether a real e ective exchange is overvalued or undervalued. There is a vast body of literature on the determinants of long-term real exchange rates and on empirical strategies to implement the equilibrium norms obtained from theoretical models. This study seeks to contribute to this literature by showing that it is possible to calculate the misalignment from a mixed ointegrated vector error correction framework. An empirical exercise using United States' real exchange rate data is performed. The results suggest that the model with mixed frequency data is preferred to the models with same frequency variables

Automatic model selection for forecasting brazilian stock returns

This study aims to contribute on the forecasting literature in stock return for emerging markets. We use Autometrics to select relevant predictors among macroeconomic, microeconomic and technical variables. We develop predictive models for the Brazilian market premium, measured as the excess return over Selic interest rate, Itaú SA, Itaú-Unibanco and Bradesco stock returns. We nd that for the market premium, an ADL with error correction is able to outperform the benchmarks in terms of economic performance. For individual stock returns, there is a trade o between statistical properties and out-of-sample performance of the model.

Automatic model selection for forecasting Brazilian stock returns

This study aims to contribute on the forecasting literature in stock return for emerging markets. We use Autometrics to select relevant predictors among macroeconomic, microeconomic and technical variables. We develop predictive models for the Brazilian market premium, measured as the excess return over Selic interest rate, Itaú SA, Itaú-Unibanco and Bradesco stock returns. We find that for the market premium, an ADL with error correction is able to outperform the benchmarks in terms of economic performance. For individual stock returns, there is a trade o between statistical properties and out-of-sample performance of the model.

Mhealth entrepreneurship: an exploratory research for a managerial model for mhealth start ups in low and middle income countries

Since some years, mobile technologies in healthcare (mHealth) stand for the transformational force to improve health issues in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Although several studies have identified the prevailing issue of inconsistent evidence and new evaluation frameworks have been proposed, few have explored the role of entrepreneurship to create disruptive change in a traditionally conservative sector. I argue that improving the effectiveness of mHealth entrepreneurs might increase the adoption of mHealth solutions. Thus, this study aims at proposing a managerial model for the analysis of mHealth solutions from the entrepreneurial perspective in the context of LMICs. I identified the Khoja–Durrani–Scott (KDS) framework as theoretical basis for the managerial model, due to its explicit focus on the context of LMICs. In the subsequent exploratory research I, first, used semi-structured interviews with five specialists in mHealth, local healthcare systems and investment to identify necessary adaptations to the model. The findings of the interviews proposed that especially the economic theme had to be clarified and an additional entrepreneurial theme was necessary. Additionally, an evaluation questionnaire was proposed. In the second phase, I applied the questionnaire to five start-ups, operating in Brazil and Tanzania, and conducted semi-structured interviews with the entrepreneurs to gain practical insights for the theoretical development. Three of five entrepreneurs perceived that the results correlated with the entrepreneurs' expectations of the strengths and weaknesses of the start-ups. Main shortcomings of the model related to the ambiguity of some questions. In addition to the findings for the model, the results of the scores were analyzed. The analysis suggested that across the participating mHealth start-ups the ‘behavioral and socio-technical’ outcomes were the strongest and the ‘policy’ outcomes were the weakest themes. The managerial model integrates several perspectives, structured around the entrepreneur. In order to validate the model, future research may link the development of a start-up with the evolution of the scores in longitudinal case studies or large-scale tests.

Bank networks and firm credit: an agent based model approach

Starting from the idea that economic systems fall into complexity theory, where its many agents interact with each other without a central control and that these interactions are able to change the future behavior of the agents and the entire system, similar to a chaotic system we increase the model of Russo et al. (2014) to carry out three experiments focusing on the interaction between Banks and Firms in an artificial economy. The first experiment is relative to Relationship Banking where, according to the literature, the interaction over time between Banks and Firms are able to produce mutual benefits, mainly due to reduction of the information asymmetry between them. The following experiment is related to information heterogeneity in the credit market, where the larger the bank, the higher their visibility in the credit market, increasing the number of consult for new loans. Finally, the third experiment is about the effects on the credit market of the heterogeneity of prices that Firms faces in the goods market.

Economic growth and complementarity between stages of human capital

We study the impact of the different stages of human capital accumulation on the evolution of labor productivity in a model calibrated to the U.S. from 1961 to 2008. We add early childhood education to a standard continuous time life cycle economy and assume complementarity between educational stages. There are three sectors in the model: the goods sector, the early childhood sector and the formal education sector. Agents are homogenous and choose the intensity of preschool education, how long to stay in formal school, labor effort and consumption, and there are exogenous distortions to these four decisions. The model matches the data very well and closely reproduces the paths of schooling, hours worked, relative prices and GDP. We find that the reduction in distortions to early education in the period was large and made a very strong contribution to human capital accumulation. However, due to general equilibrium effects of labor market taxation, marginal modification in the incentives for early education in 2008 had a smaller impact than those for formal education. This is because the former do not decisively affect the decision to join the labor market, while the latter do. Without labor taxation, incentives for preschool are significantly stronger.