The financial leverage of large Portuguese Firms in the European context

The Financial Leverage of Large Portuguese Firms in the European Context This paper studies the leverage, cost of debt servicing ability and structure of debt maturity of large Portuguese firms, over the pre-crisis (2006-2009) and post-crisis (2010-2013) periods through a comparative analysis with other European peers. We document that large Portuguese firms have been reducing their leverage since the end of 2009. We find that this decrease in leverage is not a consequence higher Equity levels but rather a result of asset’s downsizing. We also document that Portuguese firms are still more leveraged than their European peers, even though this difference has decreased over time. High corporate debt levels are transversal across industries.

Continuidade e mudança. O sistema internacional no post‐Guerra Fria

O fim da Guerra Fria é um caso inédito de mudança pacífica da estrutura internacional, em que os Estados Unidos e a União Soviética transcendem a divisão bipolar para decidir os termos da paz no quadro das instituições que definem o modelo de ordenamento multilateral, consolidando a sua legitimidade. Nesse contexto, ao contrário dos casos precedentes de reconstrução internacional no fim de uma guerra hegemónica, o novo sistema do post-Guerra Fria, caracterizado pela unipolaridade, pela regionalização e pela homogeneização, forma-se num quadro de continuidade institucional. A ordem política do post-Guerra Fria é um sistema misto em que as tensões entre a hierarquia unipolar e a anarquia multipolar, a integração global e a fragmentação regional e a homogeneidade e a heterogeneidade política, ideológica e cultural condicionam as estratégias das potências. As crises internacionais vão pôr à prova a estabilidade da nova ordem e a sua capacidade para garantir mudanças pacíficas. A primeira década do post-Guerra Fria mostra a preponderância dos Estados Unidos e a sua confiança crescente, patente nas Guerras do Golfo Pérsico e dos Balcãs, bem como na crise dos Estreitos da Formosa. A reacção aos atentados do "11 de Setembro" revela uma tentação imperial da potência unipolar, nomeadamente com a invasão do Iraque, que provoca uma crise profunda da comunidade de segurança ocidental. A vulnerabilidade do centro da ordem internacional é confirmada pela crise constitucional europeia e pela crise financeira global. Essas crises não alteram a estrutura de poder mas aceleram a erosão da ordem multilateral e criam um novo quadro de possibilidades para a evolução internacional, que inclui uma escalada dos conflitos num quadro de multipolaridade regional, uma nova polarização entre as potências democráticas conservadoras e uma coligação revisionista autoritária, bem como a restauração de um concerto entre as principais potências internacionais.

Transparency in financial reporting by European Foundations

The increasing role of the European Foundations, urges for more transparency. The prevalent accounting frameworks in which they operate and report their activities are mostly based on national laws. This lack of harmonization, limits comparison between European foundations. Thus, this Work Project analyzes the current financial reporting by European foundations, and evaluates the similarities, differences and data availability between countries. The research provides evidence about little information available, deficiency in the financial reporting, within and between countries. The research recommends the need to ensure uniformity by providing a clear definition for public-benefit purpose, harmonization of laws and financial reporting.

Anatomy of the portuguese stock market risk and return in the 1977-2012 period

This paper analyses the Portuguese stock market since it reopened in 1977, with a special focus on the evolution of the statistic and stochastic characteristics of the market return throughout this 36 year period. The market return for the period of time between 1977 and 2012 (September 28th) is estimated and then compared with the return that would have been achieved with Government bonds and treasury bills, which allows us to confirm that the hierarchy of return / risk across the different financial instruments is verified. The market risk premium for this 36 year period is also estimated and a comparison with other markets is performed, suggesting that the Portuguese market’s risk has not been compensated by an adequate return. The study also examines the evolution of the Portuguese market’s volatility in the 1977-2012 period and compares it with other markets, showing the existence of extremely high peaks during the first 11 years, but indicating a downwards trend throughout the whole period under analysis. Finally, the correlation between market returns for Portugal and for other countries and the degree of integration are estimated and their evolution throughout time is assessed, leading to the conclusion that the performance of the Portuguese stock market has become increasingly correlated with major European markets – correlation with some markets close to 0.70 from 2000 onwards-, but that country-specific risk factors are still relevant.

Integration of geometric consistency contributory factors in three-leg junctions collision prediction models of Portuguese two-lane national highways

This paper aims at developing a collision prediction model for three-leg junctions located in national roads (NR) in Northern Portugal. The focus is to identify factors that contribute for collision type crashes in those locations, mainly factors related to road geometric consistency, since literature is scarce on those, and to research the impact of three modeling methods: generalized estimating equations, random-effects negative binomial models and random-parameters negative binomial models, on the factors of those models. The database used included data published between 2008 and 2010 of 177 three-leg junctions. It was split in three groups of contributing factors which were tested sequentially for each of the adopted models: at first only traffic, then, traffic and the geometric characteristics of the junctions within their area of influence; and, lastly, factors which show the difference between the geometric characteristics of the segments boarding the junctionsâ area of influence and the segment included in that area were added. The choice of the best modeling technique was supported by the result of a cross validation made to ascertain the best model for the three sets of researched contributing factors. The models fitted with random-parameters negative binomial models had the best performance in the process. In the best models obtained for every modeling technique, the characteristics of the road environment, including proxy measures for the geometric consistency, along with traffic volume, contribute significantly to the number of collisions. Both the variables concerning junctions and the various national highway segments in their area of influence, as well as variations from those characteristics concerning roadway segments which border the already mentioned area of influence have proven their relevance and, therefore, there is a rightful need to incorporate the effect of geometric consistency in the three-leg junctions safety studies.

Cross-delisting, financial constraints and investment sensitivities

We investigate the impact of cross-delisting on firms’ financial constraints and investment sensitivities. We find that firms that cross-delisted from a U.S. stock exchange face stronger post-delisting financial constraints than their cross-listed counterparts, as measured by investment-to-cash flow sensitivity. Following a delisting, the sensitivity of investment-to-cash flow increases significantly and firms also tend to save more cash out of cash flows. Moreover, this increase appears to be primarily driven by informational frictions that constrain access to external financing. We document that information asymmetry problems are stronger for firms from countries with weaker shareholders protection and for firms from less developed capital markets.

Assessing the production of jet mix columns using alkali activated waste based on mechanical and financial performance and CO2 (eq) emissions

Recent research has proved the potential of alkaline activated fly-ash for soil stabilisation. However, such studies have not focused on the link between financial, mechanical and environmental aspects of this solution, but only on their absolute mechanical properties. The present paper characterises the mechanical behaviour of a large spectrum of activator-ash-soil combinations used to build jet mixing columns, analysing also the cost and CO2 (eq) emissions. The concern with these two vectors forced a decrease in the quantity of stabilising agent added to the soil, relatively to previous research, and the effects of such low quantities have not yet been published. However, the results clearly showed a significant improve in strength, still well above the average values expected when improving the stressstrain behaviour of a weak soil. Uniaxial compressive strength tests were used to assess the effects of the fly-ash percentage, the alkalieash ratio and the water content. The carbon calculator recently developed by the European Federation of Foundation Contractors and the Deep Foundations Institute was used to quantify the CO2 (eq) emissions associated with this technique. The financial cost was estimated based on the experience of a major Portuguese contractor. For comparison purposes, soil cement mixtures were also analysed, using similar conditions and tools used for the soil-ash analysis. Results showed that the cement and ash solutions are very similar in terms of overall performance, with some advantage of the former regarding financial cost, and a significant advantage of the latter regarding the CO2 (eq) emissions. This new grout, although it is in an embryonic stage, it has the potential for broader developments in the field.

Novel hybrid multifunctional magnetoelectric porous composite films

Novel multifunctional porous films have been developed by the integration of magnetic CoFe2O4 (CFO) nanoparticles into poly(vinylidene fluoride)-Trifuoroethylene (P(VDF-TrFE)), taking advantage of the synergies of the magnetostrictive filler and the piezoelectric polymer. The porous films show a piezoelectric response with an effective d33 coefficient of -22 pC/N-1, a maximum magnetization of 12 emu.g-1 and a maximum magnetoelectric coefficient of 9 mV.cm-1.Oe-1. In this way, a multifunctional membrane has been developed suitable for advanced applications ranging from biomedical to water treatment.

Reconstructing transcriptional regulatory networks using data integration and text mining

Transcriptional Regulatory Networks (TRNs) are powerful tool for representing several interactions that occur within a cell. Recent studies have provided information to help researchers in the tasks of building and understanding these networks. One of the major sources of information to build TRNs is biomedical literature. However, due to the rapidly increasing number of scientific papers, it is quite difficult to analyse the large amount of papers that have been published about this subject. This fact has heightened the importance of Biomedical Text Mining approaches in this task. Also, owing to the lack of adequate standards, as the number of databases increases, several inconsistencies concerning gene and protein names and identifiers are common. In this work, we developed an integrated approach for the reconstruction of TRNs that retrieve the relevant information from important biological databases and insert it into a unique repository, named KREN. Also, we applied text mining techniques over this integrated repository to build TRNs. However, was necessary to create a dictionary of names and synonyms associated with these entities and also develop an approach that retrieves all the abstracts from the related scientific papers stored on PubMed, in order to create a corpora of data about genes. Furthermore, these tasks were integrated into @Note, a software system that allows to use some methods from the Biomedical Text Mining field, including an algorithms for Named Entity Recognition (NER), extraction of all relevant terms from publication abstracts, extraction relationships between biological entities (genes, proteins and transcription factors). And finally, extended this tool to allow the reconstruction Transcriptional Regulatory Networks through using scientific literature.

O procedimento relativo aos défices excessivos na União Económica e Monetária

Dissertação de mestrado em Direito da União Europeia

Financial stress and sovereign debt composition

"Published online: 19 Oct 2015"

Low f-number microlenses for integration on optical microsystems

This paper presents microlenses (MLs) with low f-number made of AZ4562 photoresist for integration on optical microsystems. The fabrication process was based on the thermal reflow and rehydration. Large series of MLs were fabricated with a width of 35 μm, a thickness of 5 μm, and spaced apart by 3 μm. The MLs were fabricated directly on the surface of a die with type n+/p-substrate junction photodiode fabricated in a standard CMOS process. The measured focal length was 49 μm with a tolerance of ±2 μm (maximum error of ±4%), resulting in a numerical aperture of 33.6 × 10-2 (±1.3 × 10-2). The measurements also revealed an f-number of 1.4.

Finite integration methods for isospectral flows

In this paper we consider the approximate computation of isospectral flows based on finite integration methods( FIM) with radial basis functions( RBF) interpolation,a new algorithm is developed. Our method ensures the symmetry of the solutions. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the solutions have higher accuracy by our algorithm than by the second order Runge- Kutta( RK2) method.

A política fiscal da União Europeia: diagnóstico e desafios: o caso da Taxa sobre Transações Financeiras (TTF)

Trabalho de projeto de mestrado em Políticas Comunitárias e Cooperação Territorial

A comunicação estratégica na internacionalização da curta-metragem portuguesa: um diagnóstico de comunicação à Agência de Curta Metragem

Dissertação de mestrado em Comunicação, Arte e Cultura