Brazilian international and inter-state trade flows: an exploratory analysis using the gravity model

Recent efforts toward a world with freer trade, like WTO/GATT or regional Preferential Trade Agreements(PTAs), were put in doubt after McCallum's(1995) finding of a large border effect between US and Canadian provinces. Since then, there has been a great amount of research on this topic employing the gravity equation. This dissertation has two goals. The first goal is to review comprehensively the recent literature about the gravity equation, including its usages, econometric specifications, and the efforts to provide it with microeconomic foundations. The second goal is the estimation of the Brazilian border effect (or 'home-bias trade puzzle') using inter-state and international trade flow data. It is used a pooled cross-section Tobit model. The lowest border effect estimated was 15, which implies that Brazilian states trade among themselves 15 times more than they trade with foreign countries. Further research using industry disaggregated data is needed to qualify the estimated border effect with respect to which part of that effect can be attributed to actual trade costs and which part is the outcome of the endogenous location problem of the firm.

Estudo do inter-relacionamento dos problemas humanos e organizacionais.

Este estudo-piloto é uma tentativa de abordar a questão do inter-relacionamento entre os problemas humanos e organizacionais, centrando-se a análise na descoberta dos fatores que facilitam ou impedem a satisfação no trabalho, em uma empresa de prestação de serviços públicos a todo o estado do Rio de Janeiro. Já o modelo de análise organizacional proposto considera a organização e o indivíduo como um sistema permeável às características da sociedade tornando-se, desse modo, fundamental que se determina-se há inter-relações entre os fatores socioeconômicos, mais diretamente ligados à estrutura social, e os fatores motivacionais, mais diretamente ligados à estrutura interna do indivíduo e da empresa. Através da discussão dos resultados, alguns subsídios foram dados à empresa para fazer frente aos complexos problemas que surgiram em face da modificação de seu meio-ambiente (interno e externo). Várias considerações foram feitas quanto ao problema da "medida" da satisfação no trabalho, tendo sido discutida, no último capítulo, a viabilidade de se estender a presente pesquisa a toda a organização.

Estimating Brazilian monthly GDP: a state-space approach

The first contribution of this paper is to employ a superior interpolation method that enables to estimate, nowcast and forecast monthly Brazilian GDP for 1980-2012 in an integrated way; see Bernanke, Gertler and Watson (1997, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity). The second contribution, along the spirit of Mariano and Murasawa (2003, Journal of Applied Econometrics), is to propose and test a myriad of inter-polation models and interpolation auxiliary series all coincident with GDP from a business-cycle dating point of view. Based on these results, we finally choose the most appropriate monthly indicator for Brazilian GDP. Third, this monthly GDP estimate is compared to an economic activity indicator widely used by practitioners in Brazil - the Brazilian Economic Activity Index - (IBC-Br). We found that our monthly GDP tracks economic activity better than IBC-Br. This happens by construction, since our state-space approach imposes the restriction (discipline) that our monthly estimate must add up to the quarterly observed series in any given quarter, which may not hold regarding IBC-Br. Moreover, our method has the advantage to be easily implemented: it only requires conditioning on two observed series for estimation, while estimating IBC-Br requires the availability of hundreds of monthly series. The third contribution is to illustrate, in a nowcasting and forecasting exercise, the advantages of our integrated approach. Finally, we compare the chronology of recessions of our monthly estimate with those done elsewhere.