A vocação totalizante da história oral e o exemplo da formação do acervo de entrevistas do CPDOC

This paper discusses the oral history vocation to totality taking as example the formation of the CPDOC’s (Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil da Fundação Getulio Vargas) oral history archive. As “vocation to totality” we consider specially the construction of senses and syntheses of the past and the hermeneutical perspective in which oral history is inserted.

Immigration and memory

The town of Nova Friburgo, in Brazil, was founded in 1820 by swiss immigrants who, as often happens in the majority of migratory flows, crossed the ocean in search of better life conditions. The scope of this paper is to trail the path of a swiss immigrant called Marianne Joset Salusse and then follow on to investigate the mechanisms involved in elaborating family memory and public memory around this woman who would become a symbol of immigration to this town. Thus a series of interviews were held with her descendants, which were fundamental for the understanding of current representations and the main elements which constitute the collective memory around Marianne. Besides oral sources, we had recourse to written documents which allowed a retrieval of relevant information about her life. More than simply adding information, written sources allowed for a more profound analysis of oral accounts, unravelling as well as unveiling selective procedures peculiar to memory construction (Pollak, 1989;1992).

Diário pessoal, autobiografia e fontes orais: a trajetória de Pierre Deffontaines

A proposta deste trabalho é discutir as características e as possibilidades de uso, para a pesquisa histórica, do diário da sra. Deffontaines e da autobiografia de Pierre Deffontaines, bem como dos depoimentos orais concedidos por seus descendentes. A idéia básica é analisar os pontos de convergência e os conflitos de memória apresentados nesses três tipos de fontes, e seus significados para a compreensão da trajetória intelectual de Deffontaines. A hipótese central que norteia a análise é a de que as três fontes revelam memórias divergentes, na medida em que as três modalidades de relato tinham objetivos diversos, foram produzidas em momentos distintos e por pessoas de gerações também diferentes: Deffontaines, sua mulher, sua filha e seu neto. Nosso objetivo será exatamente mostrar como e por que se delinearam essas memórias diferenciadas.

Migração, seleção e diferenças regionais de renda no Brasil

Este trabalho tem como objetivo testar se os brasileiros que moram numa unidade federativa diferente da unidade em que nasceram – os migrantes – formam um grupo positivamente selecionado (isto é, um grupo que seja, em média, mais apto, motivado, empreendedor, agressivo, ambicioso do que outro grupo) da população brasileira. Utilizando a PNAD de 1999, mostramos que os migrantes ganham, em média, mais do que os não-migrantes, no Brasil, inclusive quando controlamos uma série de variáveis importantes na determinação da renda do trabalho. A partir desse resultado concluímos que, de fato, os migrantes, no Brasil, constituem um grupo positivamente selecionado. Como os migrantes saem das regiões mais pobres do país para as mais ricas, este fato pode estar agravando a desigualdade inter-regional de renda do país.

Testing the optimality of aggregate consumption decisions: is there rule-of-thumb behavior?

Consumption is an important macroeconomic aggregate, being about 70% of GNP. Finding sub-optimal behavior in consumption decisions casts a serious doubt on whether optimizing behavior is applicable on an economy-wide scale, which, in turn, challenge whether it is applicable at all. This paper has several contributions to the literature on consumption optimality. First, we provide a new result on the basic rule-of-thumb regression, showing that it is observational equivalent to the one obtained in a well known optimizing real-business-cycle model. Second, for rule-of-thumb tests based on the Asset-Pricing Equation, we show that the omission of the higher-order term in the log-linear approximation yields inconsistent estimates when lagged observables are used as instruments. However, these are exactly the instruments that have been traditionally used in this literature. Third, we show that nonlinear estimation of a system of N Asset-Pricing Equations can be done efficiently even if the number of asset returns (N) is high vis-a-vis the number of time-series observations (T). We argue that efficiency can be restored by aggregating returns into a single measure that fully captures intertemporal substitution. Indeed, we show that there is no reason why return aggregation cannot be performed in the nonlinear setting of the Pricing Equation, since the latter is a linear function of individual returns. This forms the basis of a new test of rule-of-thumb behavior, which can be viewed as testing for the importance of rule-of-thumb consumers when the optimizing agent holds an equally-weighted portfolio or a weighted portfolio of traded assets. Using our setup, we find no signs of either rule-of-thumb behavior for U.S. consumers or of habit-formation in consumption decisions in econometric tests. Indeed, we show that the simple representative agent model with a CRRA utility is able to explain the time series data on consumption and aggregate returns. There, the intertemporal discount factor is significant and ranges from 0.956 to 0.969 while the relative risk-aversion coefficient is precisely estimated ranging from 0.829 to 1.126. There is no evidence of rejection in over-identifying-restriction tests.