Private or public? a taxonomy of optimal ownership and management regimes

We develop a theory of public versus private ownership based on value diversion by managers. Government is assumed to face stronger institutional constraints than has been assumed in previous literature. The model which emerges from these assumptions is fexible and has wide application. We provide amapping between the qualitative characteristics of an asset, its main use - including public goods characteristics, and spillovers toother assets values - and the optimal ownership and management regime. The model is applied to single and multiple related assets. We address questions such as; when is it optimal to have one of a pair ofr elated assets public and the other private; when is joint management desirable; and when should a public asset be managed by the owner of a related private asset? We show that while private ownership can be judged optimal in some cases solely on the basis of qualitative information, the optimality of any other ownership and management regimes relies on quantitative analysis. Our results reveal the situations in which policy makers will have difficulty in determining the opimal regime.

Não há que ser flexível, há que ser forte: um estudo sobre os limites no trabalho e na família

É cada vez maior o número de indivíduos que lidam com responsabilidades familiares e de trabalho nas suas rotinas do dia a dia. Esse cenário tem levado a um maior número de investigações sobre as relações entre trabalho e família e os impactos das mesmas na vida dos indivíduos e nas organizações. Diversas são as abordagens e perspectivas teóricas que buscam explicar a ligação entre esses dois domínios e que exploram os efeitos que trabalho e família podem exercer um sobre o outro. O presente estudo aborda a relação trabalho-família a partir da concepção dos limites existentes nestes domínios, limites estes que influenciam diretamente no modo como a interface trabalho-família é construída. São desenvolvidas hipóteses de pesquisa que exploram o constructo força do limite (boundary strength), seus antecedentes e sua relação com o conflito trabalho-família e com o estresse ocupacional. Propõe-se ainda uma relação de moderação do suporte social na relação entre conflito trabalho-família e estresse ocupacional. Para testar a validade empírica do modelo proposto, um estudo de campo é conduzido, com 401 funcionários de diversas organizações no Brasil. Os resultados sugerem que quanto maior a força do limite na família e no trabalho, menor o conflito trabalho-família experimentado pelos indivíduos e consequentemente menor o nível de estresse ocupacional. O teste empírico deu suporte ao papel moderador do suporte social de chefes e colegas de trabalho na relação entre o conflito trabalho-família e o estresse ocupacional. Implicações teóricas e práticas dos resultados obtidos são explicitadas, além de sugestões para pesquisas futuras. Espera-se que o tema amplie o foco de análise da interface trabalho-família e auxilie na compreensão da teoria e da prática organizacional.

Courts as healthcare policy-makers: the problem, the responses to the problem and problems in the responses

This article starts by analysing healthcare litigation in Brazil by means of a literature review of articles that contribute with empirical findings on this phenomenon. Based on this review, I argue that health care litigation in Brazil makes the public health system less fair and rational. In the second part of this article, I discuss the three most overarching responses to control the level of litigation and its impact on the public health system: (i) the public hearing held by the Supreme Federal Court and the criteria the court established thereafter; (ii) the recommendations by the National Council of Justice aimed at building courts’ institutional capacity; and (iii) the enactment of the Federal Law 12.401/11, which created a new health technology assessment system. I argue that latter is the best response because it keeps the substantive decisions on the allocation of healthcare resources in the institution that is in the best position to make them. Moreover, this legislation will make the decisions about provision of health treatments more explicit, making easier for courts to control the procedure and the reasons for these decisions.

Addressing important econometric issues on how to construct theoretical based exchange rate misalignment estimates

Exchange rate misalignment assessment is becoming more relevant in recent period particularly after the nancial crisis of 2008. There are di erent methodologies to address real exchange rate misalignment. The real exchange misalignment is de ned as the di erence between actual real e ective exchange rate and some equilibrium norm. Di erent norms are available in the literature. Our paper aims to contribute to the literature by showing that Behavioral Equilibrium Exchange Rate approach (BEER) adopted by Clark & MacDonald (1999), Ubide et al. (1999), Faruqee (1994), Aguirre & Calderón (2005) and Kubota (2009) among others can be improved in two following manners. The rst one consists of jointly modeling real e ective exchange rate, trade balance and net foreign asset position. The second one has to do with the possibility of explicitly testing over identifying restrictions implied by economic theory and allowing the analyst to show that these restrictions are not falsi ed by the empirical evidence. If the economic based identifying restrictions are not rejected it is also possible to decompose exchange rate misalignment in two pieces, one related to long run fundamentals of exchange rate and the other related to external account imbalances. We also discuss some necessary conditions that should be satis ed for disrcarding trade balance information without compromising exchange rate misalignment assessment. A statistical (but not a theoretical) identifying strategy for calculating exchange rate misalignment is also discussed. We illustrate the advantages of our approach by analyzing the Brazilian case. We show that the traditional approach disregard important information of external accounts equilibrium for this economy.