Banif Bank: Value creation in the Maltese market

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

IWP strategy: TechFrame

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Validation of Two US Risk Scores for Percutaneous Coronary Intervention in a Single-Center Portuguese Population of Patients with Acute Coronary Syndrome

INTRODUCTION: New scores have been developed and validated in the US for in-hospital mortality risk stratification in patients undergoing coronary angioplasty: the National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR) risk score and the Mayo Clinic Risk Score (MCRS). We sought to validate these scores in a European population with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) and to compare their predictive accuracy with that of the GRACE risk score. METHODS: In a single-center ACS registry of patients undergoing coronary angioplasty, we used the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), a graphical representation of observed vs. expected mortality, and net reclassification improvement (NRI)/integrated discrimination improvement (IDI) analysis to compare the scores. RESULTS: A total of 2148 consecutive patients were included, mean age 63 years (SD 13), 74% male and 71% with ST-segment elevation ACS. In-hospital mortality was 4.5%. The GRACE score showed the best AUC (0.94, 95% CI 0.91-0.96) compared with NCDR (0.87, 95% CI 0.83-0.91, p=0.0003) and MCRS (0.85, 95% CI 0.81-0.90, p=0.0003). In model calibration analysis, GRACE showed the best predictive power. With GRACE, patients were more often correctly classified than with MCRS (NRI 78.7, 95% CI 59.6-97.7; IDI 0.136, 95% CI 0.073-0.199) or NCDR (NRI 79.2, 95% CI 60.2-98.2; IDI 0.148, 95% CI 0.087-0.209). CONCLUSION: The NCDR and Mayo Clinic risk scores are useful for risk stratification of in-hospital mortality in a European population of patients with ACS undergoing coronary angioplasty. However, the GRACE score is still to be preferred.

Dimensions of source credibility in the case of user-generated advertisements

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Internationalization process of Science4you to the United Kingdom

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Quinta da Galharda Hotel & SPA business plan

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Internationalization of Papo D’anjo to Mexico

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Adjusting to external imbalances within the EMU, the case of Portugal

From 1995 to 2010 Portugal has accumulated a negative international asset position of 110 percent of GDP. In a developed and aging economy the number is astonishing and any argument to consider it sustainable must rely on extremely favorable forecasts on growth. Portuguese policy options are reduced in number: no autonomous monetary policy, no currency to devaluate, and limited discretion in changing fiscal deficits and government debt. To start the necessary deleveraging a remaining possible policy is a budget-neutral change of the tax structure that increases private saving and net exports. An increase in the VAT and a decrease in the employer’s social security contribution tax can achieve the desired outcome in the short run if they are complemented with wage moderation. To obtain a substantial improvement in competitiveness and a large decrease in consumption, the changes in the tax rates have to be large. While a precise quantitative assessment is difficult, the initial increase in the effective VAT rate needed to allow the social security tax to decrease by 16 percentage points (pp) is approximately 10 pp. Such a large increase in the effective VAT rate could be obtained by raising most of the reduced VAT rates to the new general VAT rate of 23 percent. The empirical analysis shows that over time the suggested tax swap could generate surpluses and improve the trade balance. A temporary version of the suggested tax-swap has the attractiveness to achieve a sharper increase in the private saving rate maintaining the short run gains in competitiveness. Finally, the temporary version of the fiscal devaluation could be the basis for an automatic stabilizer to external imbalances within a monetary union.Portugal has been running large current account deficits every year since 1995. These deficits have accumulated to an astonishing 110 percent of GDP negative external asset position. The sustainability of such a large external position is questionable and must rely on fantastic productivity growth expectations. The recent global financial crisis appears to have anticipated the international investors reality check on those future expectations with the result of a large increase in the cost of external financing. Today the rebalancing of the current account through an increase in national savings and an improvement in competitiveness must be at the top of the Portuguese authorities “to do” list as the cost of a pull out from international investors is of the order of 10% of GDP. The external rebalancing is difficult as the degrees of freedom of the Portuguese authorities are limited in number: they have no autonomous monetary policy, no currency to devaluate, and little discretion in fiscal policy as deficit limits and debt targets are set by the Stability Growth Pact and the postcrisis consensus on medium-term fiscal consolidation. One possibility that remains is to change the fiscal policy mix for a given budget deficit. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of a “fiscal devaluation”1 obtained through a tax swap between employers’ social security contributions and taxes on consumption2. The paper begins by illustrating Portugal’s current account evolution during the euro period. The second section section lays out a model to offer a qualitative assessment of the dynamic outcomes of the the tax swap. I show that the suggested tax swap can in theory achieve the desired outcomes in terms of competitiveness and consumption if complemented with moderation (stickiness) in wages. I also study the effects of a temporary version of the tax swap and show that it achieves a sharper improvement in the current account that accelerate the rebalancing. The third section moves to the empirical analysis and estimates the likely effects of the tax swap for the Portuguese economy. The fourth section concludes.

Social entrepreneurship as a solution provider for ageing societies in Europe

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Internationalization strategy of Quinta dos Termos to the U.S.A.

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Optimization of investment promotion tools for Portugal: Specific recommendations to attract investments from Germany

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Internationalization Plan - How can UniPlaces improve its customer acquisition strategy in the London market?

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Characterization and surface reconstruction of objects in tomographic images of composite materials

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Modelling of a wastewater treatment plant using GPS-X

Dissertation to obtain the degree of Master in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering

ClearPhoto - augmented photography

The widespread use of mobile devices has made known to the general public new areas that were hitherto confined to specialized devices. In general, the smartphone came to give all users the ability to execute multiple tasks, and among them, take photographs using the integrated cameras. Although these devices are continuously receiving improved cameras, their manufacturers do not take advantage of their full potential, since the operating systems normally offer simple APIs and applications for shooting. Therefore, taking advantage of this environment for mobile devices, we find ourselves in the best scenario to develop applications that help the user obtaining a good result when shooting. In an attempt to provide a set of techniques and tools more applied to the task, this dissertation presents, as a contribution, a set of tools for mobile devices that provides information in real-time on the composition of the scene before capturing an image. Thus, the proposed solution gives support to a user while capturing a scene with a mobile device. The user will be able to receive multiple suggestions on the composition of the scene, which will be based on rules of photography or other useful tools for photographers. The tools include horizon detection and graphical visualization of the color palette presented on the scenario being photographed. These tools were evaluated regarding the mobile device implementation and how users assess their usefulness.