Avaliação do impacto da rigidez e da flexibilização normativa, no âmbito do governo federal, sobre a eficiência dos processos de aquisição e contratação

Governmental acquisitions, in Brazil, must be proceeded, as a rule, by means of licitation. Though this principle became constitutional rule only from 1988's Constitution, its existence in Brazilian legal system retraces century XV: by that time, the Filipinas Ordinations ruled it in one only law article. Since then, several rules of law had been incorporated to the Brazilian governmental acquirement system, especially during century XX, hardening the procedures and restricting public manager's discritionarity. Current governmental acquirement system was instituted by the Law nº 8,666/1993, which, however, did not disrupt previous system: with few innovations and more restrictions, it only copied the instruments in the system of the Decree nº 2,300/1986 and previous ones. In its original text, Law nº 8,666/1993 had three licitation procedures for acquisitions - concorrência, tomada de preços, convite - and the exceptional procedures - dispensa and inexigibilidade. Once revealed itself a rigid system, several measures were implemented in order to make it more flexible, having for objectives celerity and price reduction, from discrete alterations of articles of laws to the creation of pregão as a new licitation procedure - initially, there was only the pregão presencial, proceeded face to face - and no longer, the pregão eletrônico, proceeded through web. This research focuses the analysis of the impact of the rigidity / flexibility on Government acquirement system. Despite specialized literature, studies carried through for governmental agencies and state publicity praises the results reached with the use of the pregão eletrônico, the analyses that lead to such conclusion are based on questionable premises. The studies on the efficiency of the pregão eletrônico restrict this concept to its economic dimension, interpreting it as costs reduction. Beyond, the methodology of analysis of this cost reduction has for reference hypothetical values which are also defined by random standards. Here it is, therefore, the objective of this study: to analyze, from the perception of the public managers, the relation between flexibility or rigidity of a procedure and its efficiency, under a multidimensional perspective - taking into consideration, beyond the prices gotten for objects, the time of transaction, the quality of objects and the security of the procedure. From the answers to the questionnaires applied to licitation managers and to members of licitations permanent commissions it was raisen three kinds of information: descriptive data concerning to the ordinal or nominal variables, extracted from the analysis of the objective fields of the questionnaire; not-structuralized, extracted directly from the subjective fields of the questionnaire; e, finally, treated data, extracted from the hypotheses formulated in the research and statistically analyzed. The reflections on the information allowed concluding that the acquirement governmental procedures flexibility extends its efficiency. Restricted the analysis to the pregão eletrônico, it is concluded that it is more efficient under the economic and time perspectives, in relation to the classic procedures; however, under the perspective of the security it does not significantly differs from those; under the qualitative perspective, it is less efficient than the classic procedures, implying in the reduction of the quality of acquired or contracted objects.

Otimização de alavancagem e gestão de risco em estratégias long-short

Alavancagem em hedge funds tem preocupado investidores e estudiosos nos últimos anos. Exemplos recentes de estratégias desse tipo se mostraram vantajosos em períodos de pouca incerteza na economia, porém desastrosos em épocas de crise. No campo das finanças quantitativas, tem-se procurado encontrar o nível de alavancagem que otimize o retorno de um investimento dado o risco que se corre. Na literatura, os estudos têm se mostrado mais qualitativos do que quantitativos e pouco se tem usado de métodos computacionais para encontrar uma solução. Uma forma de avaliar se alguma estratégia de alavancagem aufere ganhos superiores do que outra é definir uma função objetivo que relacione risco e retorno para cada estratégia, encontrar as restrições do problema e resolvê-lo numericamente por meio de simulações de Monte Carlo. A presente dissertação adotou esta abordagem para tratar o investimento em uma estratégia long-short em um fundo de investimento de ações em diferentes cenários: diferentes formas de alavancagem, dinâmicas de preço das ações e níveis de correlação entre esses preços. Foram feitas simulações da dinâmica do capital investido em função das mudanças dos preços das ações ao longo do tempo. Considerou-se alguns critérios de garantia de crédito, assim como a possibilidade de compra e venda de ações durante o período de investimento e o perfil de risco do investidor. Finalmente, estudou-se a distribuição do retorno do investimento para diferentes níveis de alavancagem e foi possível quantificar qual desses níveis é mais vantajoso para a estratégia de investimento dadas as restrições de risco.

Cherry picking with synthetic controls

The synthetic control (SC) method has been recently proposed as an alternative method to estimate treatment e ects in comparative case studies. Abadie et al. [2010] and Abadie et al. [2015] argue that one of the advantages of the SC method is that it imposes a data-driven process to select the comparison units, providing more transparency and less discretionary power to the researcher. However, an important limitation of the SC method is that it does not provide clear guidance on the choice of predictor variables used to estimate the SC weights. We show that such lack of speci c guidances provides signi cant opportunities for the researcher to search for speci cations with statistically signi cant results, undermining one of the main advantages of the method. Considering six alternative speci cations commonly used in SC applications, we calculate in Monte Carlo simulations the probability of nding a statistically signi cant result at 5% in at least one speci cation. We nd that this probability can be as high as 13% (23% for a 10% signi cance test) when there are 12 pre-intervention periods and decay slowly with the number of pre-intervention periods. With 230 pre-intervention periods, this probability is still around 10% (18% for a 10% signi cance test). We show that the speci cation that uses the average pre-treatment outcome values to estimate the weights performed particularly bad in our simulations. However, the speci cation-searching problem remains relevant even when we do not consider this speci cation. We also show that this speci cation-searching problem is relevant in simulations with real datasets looking at placebo interventions in the Current Population Survey (CPS). In order to mitigate this problem, we propose a criterion to select among SC di erent speci cations based on the prediction error of each speci cations in placebo estimations

Revisiting the synthetic control estimator

The synthetic control (SC) method has been recently proposed as an alternative to estimate treatment effects in comparative case studies. The SC relies on the assumption that there is a weighted average of the control units that reconstruct the potential outcome of the treated unit in the absence of treatment. If these weights were known, then one could estimate the counterfactual for the treated unit using this weighted average. With these weights, the SC would provide an unbiased estimator for the treatment effect even if selection into treatment is correlated with the unobserved heterogeneity. In this paper, we revisit the SC method in a linear factor model where the SC weights are considered nuisance parameters that are estimated to construct the SC estimator. We show that, when the number of control units is fixed, the estimated SC weights will generally not converge to the weights that reconstruct the factor loadings of the treated unit, even when the number of pre-intervention periods goes to infinity. As a consequence, the SC estimator will be asymptotically biased if treatment assignment is correlated with the unobserved heterogeneity. The asymptotic bias only vanishes when the variance of the idiosyncratic error goes to zero. We suggest a slight modification in the SC method that guarantees that the SC estimator is asymptotically unbiased and has a lower asymptotic variance than the difference-in-differences (DID) estimator when the DID identification assumption is satisfied. If the DID assumption is not satisfied, then both estimators would be asymptotically biased, and it would not be possible to rank them in terms of their asymptotic bias.

The eager fight for supremacy in the online service industry: a comparative study of M&A activities: case studies of Apple, Google and Microsoft

A indústria de serviços online é caracterizada por um volume alto de Fusões e Aquisições no período de 2005 a 2015. As líderes de mercado, Apple, Google e Microsoft, incorporaram essa forma de crescimento inorgânico em suas estratégias corporativas. Essa tese examina as atividades de Fusões e Aquisições dessas três empresas. Consequentemente, ela tem foco em dois aspectos principais. Primeiro, existe o objetivo de saciar uma escassez na literatura acadêmica, no que se diz respeito ao estabelecimento de uma conexão entre a estratégia corporativa dessas empresas e as decisões tomadas de Fusões e Aquisições. Segundo, há também o objetivo de estimar possíveis futuros desenvolvimentos no setor. Através de uma análise de conteúdo qualitativa das publicações das empresas, relatórios de análise de mercado, e outros conteúdos de terceiros, estudos de caso foram desenvolvidos. Os resultados mostram o processo de posicionamento estratégico por parte da Apple, Google e Microsoft, dentro do mercado de serviços online, entre os anos de 2005 e 2015. As recorrentes fusões e aquisições são analisadas, no que se diz respeito as estratégias corporativas dessas empresas e a responsividade perante as atividades de seus competidores. Os resultados evidenciam atividades agressivas de Fusões e Aquisições em grupos estratégicos em comum entre as três empresas, especialmente no mercado de aparelhos de comunicação móvel e serviços de comunicação.