Current account and capital mobility hypothesis: Evidence from the G-7

This paper investigates an intertemporal optimization model in order to analyze the current account of the G-7 countries, measured as the present value of the future changes in net output. The study compares observed and forecasted series, generated by the model, using Campbell & Shiller’s (1987) methodology. In the estimation process, the countries are considered separately (with OLS technique) as well as jointly (SURE approach), to capture contemporaneous correlations of the shocks in net output. The paper also proposes a note on Granger causality and its implications to the optimal current account. The empirical results are sensitive to the technique adopted in the estimation process and suggest a rejection of the model in the G-7 countries, except for the USA and Japan, according to some papers presented in the literature.

William Gaddis's aesthetics of recognitions

William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) is a selfreflexive novel that portrays Wyatt Gwyon’s trajectory from childhood to maturity, as he rejects and searches for originality. The present work bestows an analysis of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions focusing on the problematization of originality and authorship proposed by the novel by means of the central issues of forgery and plagiarism, which bring with them two larger and more important sister-notions: authorship and originality. The novel questions the prevailing demand for originality and discusses the possibility of being original. It formulates an aesthetics of recognitions defended in the novel and used by the author in the making of this text. In order to do that, this work provides a view on the different concepts associated with the terms originality and original, as well as some of the main infringements related to them in contemporary society. It also offers an account of the development of the concepts of originality and authorship in Western society, showing the growing importance of the figure of the author and the parallel development of the concepts of plagiarism and copyright. The next three chapters are dedicated to attempt to provide an account of William Gaddis’s The Recognitions focusing on the main artist characters and an analysis of the novel in the light of the theoretical and historical background provided. The first of these chapters focuses on Wyatt’s trajectory and his visions of art. The second identifies and analyses Wyatt’s mirrors in the narrative, which reinforce the self-reflective structure of the novel. And the third chapter exemplifies and analyses Wyatt’s aesthetics of recognitions, which turns out to be Gaddis’s own aesthetics in the making of his fiction.

Models of complexity in Robert Coover's John's wife and the adventures of Lucky Pierre

This doctoral dissertation analyzes two novels by the American novelist Robert Coover as examples of hypertextual writing on the book bound page, as tokens of hyperfiction. The complexity displayed in the novels, John's Wife and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, integrates the cultural elements that characterize the contemporary condition of capitalism and technologized practices that have fostered a different subjectivity evidenced in hypertextual writing and reading, the posthuman subjectivity. The models that account for the complexity of each novel are drawn from the concept of strange attractors in Chaos Theory and from the concept of rhizome in Nomadology. The transformations the characters undergo in the degree of their corporeality sets the plane on which to discuss turbulence and posthumanity. The notions of dynamic patterns and strange attractors, along with the concept of the Body without Organs and Rhizome are interpreted, leading to the revision of narratology and to analytical categories appropriate to the study of the novels. The reading exercised throughout this dissertation enacts Daniel Punday's corporeal reading. The changes in the characters' degree of materiality are associated with the stages of order, turbulence and chaos in the story, bearing on the constitution of subjectivity within and along the reading process. Coover's inscription of planes of consistency to counter linearity and accommodate hypertextual features to the paper supported narratives describes the characters' trajectory as rhizomatic. The study led to the conclusion that narrative today stands more as a regime in a rhizomatic relation with other regimes in cultural practice than as an exclusively literary form and genre. Besides this, posthuman subjectivity emerges as class identity, holding hypertextual novels as their literary form of choice.

Law and narrative: a life history interview with a Brazilian jurist

This article discusses some issues in communicating experience, based on a life history interview with 83-year-old Brazilian jurist Evandro Lins e Silva conducted by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation’s oral history program (Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, or CPDOC) between August 1994 and January 1995.1The text focuses especially on two images used by the interviewee, which consolidate both the experiences that have been communicated to him and the experience that he himself endeavors to communicate regarding his activities as an attorney and the status of truth within the field of law.

Essays on banking theory and history of financial arrangements

Esta tese contém dois capítulos, cada um lidando com a teoria e a história dos bancos e arranjos financeiros. No capítulo 1, busca-se extender uma economia Diamond-Dybvig com monitoramento imperfeito dos saques antecipados e realizar uma comparação do bem estar social em cada uma das alocações possíveis, como proposto em Presscott and Weinberg(2003). Esse monitoramento imperfeito é implementado a partir da comunicação indireta ( através de um meio de pagamento) entre os agentes e a máquina de depósitos e saques que é um agregado do setor produtivo e financeiro. A extensão consiste em estudar alocações onde uma fração dos agentes pode explorar o monitoramento imperfeito e fraudar a alocação contratada ao consumirem mais cedo além do limite, usando múltiplos meios de pagamento. Com a punição limitada no período de consumo tardio, essa nova alocação pode ser chamada de uma alocação separadora em contraste com as alocações agregadoras onde o agente com habilidade de fraudar é bloqueado por um meio de pagamento imune a fraude, mas custoso, ou por receber consumo futuro suficiente para tornar a fraude desinteressante. A comparação de bem estar na gama de parâmetros escolhida mostra que as alocações separadoras são ótimas para as economias com menor dotação e as agregadoras para as de nível intermediário e as ricas. O capítulo termina com um possível contexto histórico para o modelo, o qual se conecta com a narrativa histórica encontrada no capítulo 2. No capítulo 2 são exploradas as propriedade quantitativas de um sistema de previsão antecedente para crises financeiras, com as váriaveis sendo escolhidas a partir de um arcabouço de ``boom and bust'' descrito mais detalhadamente no apêndice 1. As principais variáveis são: o crescimento real nos preços de imóveis e ações, o diferencial entre os juros dos títulos governamentais de 10 anos e a taxa de 3 meses no mercado inter-bancário e o crescimento nos ativos totais do setor bancário. Essas variáveis produzem uma taxa mais elevada de sinais corretos para as crises bancárias recentes (1984-2008) do que os sistemas de indicadores antecedentes comparáveis. Levar em conta um risco de base crescente ( devido à tendência de acumulação de distorções no sistema de preços relativos em expansões anteriores) também provê informação e eleva o número de sinais corretos em países que não passaram por uma expansão creditícia e nos preços de ativos tão vigorosa.

Some notes about the determination of current account equilibrium real exchange rate and the relation between real exchange rate and productive specialization

The objective of these notes is to present a simple mathematical model of the determination of current account real exchange rate as defined by Bresser-Pereira (2010); i.e. the real exchange rate that guarantees the inter temporal equilibrium of balance of payments and to show the relation between Real Exchange rate and Productive Specialization at theoretical and empirical level.

How the full opening of the capital account to highly liquid financial markets led Latin America to two and a half cycles of ‘mania, panic and crash’

Latin America has recently experienced three cycles of capital inflows, the first two ending in major financial crises. The first took place between 1973 and the 1982 ‘debt-crisis’. The second took place between the 1989 ‘Brady bonds’ agreement (and the beginning of the economic reforms and financial liberalisation that followed) and the Argentinian 2001/2002 crisis, and ended up with four major crises (as well as the 1997 one in East Asia) — Mexico (1994), Brazil (1999), and two in Argentina (1995 and 2001/2). Finally, the third inflow-cycle began in 2003 as soon as international financial markets felt reassured by the surprisingly neo-liberal orientation of President Lula’s government; this cycle intensified in 2004 with the beginning of a (purely speculative) commodity price-boom, and actually strengthened after a brief interlude following the 2008 global financial crash — and at the time of writing (mid-2011) this cycle is still unfolding, although already showing considerable signs of distress. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the financial crises resulting from this second cycle (both in LA and in East Asia) from the perspective of Keynesian/ Minskyian/ Kindlebergian financial economics. I will attempt to show that no matter how diversely these newly financially liberalised Developing Countries tried to deal with the absorption problem created by the subsequent surges of inflow (and they did follow different routes), they invariably ended up in a major crisis. As a result (and despite the insistence of mainstream analysis), these financial crises took place mostly due to factors that were intrinsic (or inherent) to the workings of over-liquid and under-regulated financial markets — and as such, they were both fully deserved and fairly predictable. Furthermore, these crises point not just to major market failures, but to a systemic market failure: evidence suggests that these crises were the spontaneous outcome of actions by utility-maximising agents, freely operating in friendly (‘light-touch’) regulated, over-liquid financial markets. That is, these crises are clear examples that financial markets can be driven by buyers who take little notice of underlying values — i.e., by investors who have incentives to interpret information in a biased fashion in a systematic way. Thus, ‘fat tails’ also occurred because under these circumstances there is a high likelihood of self-made disastrous events. In other words, markets are not always right — indeed, in the case of financial markets they can be seriously wrong as a whole. Also, as the recent collapse of ‘MF Global’ indicates, the capacity of ‘utility-maximising’ agents operating in (excessively) ‘friendly-regulated’ and over-liquid financial market to learn from previous mistakes seems rather limited.

How the full opening of the capital account to highly liquid financial markets led Latin America to two and a half cycles of ‘mania, panic and crash’

Latin America has recently experienced three cycles of capital inflows, the first two ending in major financial crises. The first took place between 1973 and the 1982 ‘debt-crisis’. The second took place between the 1989 ‘Brady bonds’ agreement (and the beginning of the economic reforms and financial liberalisation that followed) and the Argentinian 2001/2002 crisis, and ended up with four major crises (as well as the 1997 one in East Asia) — Mexico (1994), Brazil (1999), and two in Argentina (1995 and 2001/2). Finally, the third inflow-cycle began in 2003 as soon as international financial markets felt reassured by the surprisingly neo-liberal orientation of President Lula’s government; this cycle intensified in 2004 with the beginning of a (purely speculative) commodity price-boom, and actually strengthened after a brief interlude following the 2008 global financial crash — and at the time of writing (mid-2011) this cycle is still unfolding, although already showing considerable signs of distress. The main aim of this paper is to analyse the financial crises resulting from this second cycle (both in LA and in East Asia) from the perspective of Keynesian/ Minskyian/ Kindlebergian financial economics. I will attempt to show that no matter how diversely these newly financially liberalised Developing Countries tried to deal with the absorption problem created by the subsequent surges of inflow (and they did follow different routes), they invariably ended up in a major crisis. As a result (and despite the insistence of mainstream analysis), these financial crises took place mostly due to factors that were intrinsic (or inherent) to the workings of over-liquid and under-regulated financial markets — and as such, they were both fully deserved and fairly predictable. Furthermore, these crises point not just to major market failures, but to a systemic market failure: evidence suggests that these crises were the spontaneous outcome of actions by utility-maximising agents, freely operating in friendly (light-touched) regulated, over-liquid financial markets. That is, these crises are clear examples that financial markets can be driven by buyers who take little notice of underlying values — investors have incentives to interpret information in a biased fashion in a systematic way. ‘Fat tails’ also occurred because under these circumstances there is a high likelihood of self-made disastrous events. In other words, markets are not always right — indeed, in the case of financial markets they can be seriously wrong as a whole. Also, as the recent collapse of ‘MF Global’ indicates, the capacity of ‘utility-maximising’ agents operating in unregulated and over-liquid financial market to learn from previous mistakes seems rather limited.

A complexidade do ser fictício: a construção da personagem Marcela no romance A ostra e o vento

It is possible to notice that the modern narrative increasingly seeks to invest its characters with a broad and complex nature, away from the well-defined beings of the traditional narrative. Through this work, we aim to make a study of Marcela, a character of the novel A ostra e o vento, by Moacir Costa Lopes, taking into account the way the complexity of the fictitious being is constituted through an analysis of structural, semantic, and thematic elements. We first will bring up a brief theoretical discussion about the character in a novel, and we also will carefully analyze the diagetic universe, presenting the complex path of the character further. Subsequently, we will focus on the structure of the narrative which creates a complex picture of the character, using the technique of crossed points of view as well as the technique of temporal fragmentation. Finally, we will investigate conflicting social relations that portray Marcela s disturbed inner side, as well as the metaphoric symbolic language, which furnishes a number of different representation of this character, impeding the creation of a well-structured coherent character. Studies of scholars such as Antonio Candido, Anatol Rosenfeld, Vitor Manuel de Aguiar e Silva, Fernando Segolin, Gerard Genette, Michel Zéraffa, among others, will guide our analysis

Conectores sequenciadores e e aí em contos e narrativas de experiência pessoal escritos por alunos de ensino fundamental: uma abordagem sociofuncionalista

In this dissertation, based on two theoretical frameworks, American functionalism and variationist sociolinguistics, I take as subject the sequence connectors E and AÍ, which has the grammatical function of indicating retroactive-propeller sequenciation of information. I analyze the variable use of these connectors in texts written by students from two public schools in the city of Natal, RN, attending at the time of data collection (the year 2012), two distinct levels of basic education: the sixth and the ninth year. The students who contributed to this research wrote, as part of their activities in the classroom, texts of two narrative genres: narrative of personal experience (non-fictional) and short story (fictional). In addition, these students and their Portuguese teachers answered a test of linguistic attitude in which they gave their opinions regarding the appropriateness of the use of connectors E and AÍ in contexts of speech and writing marked by distinct degrees of formality. The results obtained by means of quantitative analysis showed different tendencies of linguistic, social and stylistic distribution of connectors E and AÍ in the narrative texts written by the students. I related these results to the action of two principles: the principle of persistence, linked to the process of change by grammaticalization, and the principle of stylistic markedness. Besides, I took into account the answers provided by students and teachers to the test of linguistic attitude for refine the interpretation of the results

As construções adverbiais em mente: análise funcionalista e implicações para o ensino de língua materna

This research aims at investigating the constructions with adverbials in ly, based on the view of contemporaneous linguistic functionalism, such as proposed by Givón, Hopper, Thompson, Traugott, Furtado da Cunha, as well as the cognitivist notion of language, through construction grammar support upon the patterns of Goldberg and the prototypes theory. The cognitive functional approach adopted here considers the change as a proper and inherent phenomenon of language and understands the linguistic phenomenon as resulting from effective use of language. Another aspect to be considered to the realization of this study is the fact that the formation adjective + ly is a word construction mechanism really productive, which generates interests on linguistic description. In a particular way, our leading objective is to exam the constructions with adverbials in ly in the context of language in use, in its oral and written forms, looking for to apprehend the meaning multiple manifestations forged in the use. Bearing this in mind, we worked with data from the Corpus Discurso & Gramática (Natal). There are, in the data, adverbs ended in ly that take the signification of mode, as foreseen in traditional models, but there are also other significations, for instance, the modalizador in its different manifestations. The results show that this adverb is a linguistic mark that carries in its constitution the multissêmico and multifunctional character, which interferes extremely in the ordination of this category, assuming a position sometimes pre-verbal, sometimes post-verbal. Other aspect observed refers to the relationship between the adverb and the verb, with emphasis on the compatibility or restriction between them, option which is related to the semantic aspect. The data in analysis legitimate the use in different constructions with adverb ended in ly in various genres, as follows: personal experience narrative, retold narrative, local description, proceeding account, opinion account, both in oral as in written language

A festa da urbe e o nascimento da cidade: A Cidade Antiga como prelúdio da modernidade

This work is a result of an research that aims to understand in which way the work The Ancient City of the French historian Fustel de Coulanges built a moral model for the institutions and for the construction of the French territory in the century XIX understood like The Modern City . Our intention is to present a study on the way like the ancient city it was built, when nationalist of century XIX is taking into account his connections with the space reforms and the discussion in France. In this sense, we go besides the works of the historiography of the century XIX on this subject and of the articles and tests of the beginning of the century XX, when urbanity planner tied the narrative Scientifics of Fustel with the discussion in France of this period and his contribution, through this connection between history and space, with the national education of the individuals and the formation of the French identity. In this way, we understand which History, Nation and Space were the bases of sustenance of the theory of Coulanges about The Ancient City and of the formation of the French territory. Besides, the discussion historiography between Frenchmen and Germans on the origins of his respective nations influenced Coulanges the perspective of narrating a history of the Antiquity, taking into account the cultural approach of the past and the modern Institutions

Do útero à adoção: a experiência de mulheres férteis que adotaram uma criança

Even with all changes and ruptures related to the social roles that woman had performed, the literature had confirmed that the motherhood still configures it like one of the main roles that she hopes to play in some moment of her life. When the woman did not get pregnant or take ahead a pregnancy, some women find in adoption an alternative to play this role. This research aimed to understand the experience of being mother for adoption in the case of fertile women, but whose partner is infertile. Supported by existential-phenomenological theory, used it the narrative, how methodological instrument. Participated five women, whose adoption process followed the legal ways in the Youngness and Infancy Judgeship of Natal/RN. The results showed that in the selfish training, the woman to see herself how whose role principal is to generate children, although, she think that is natural her participation in others activities go out home too. In male infertile case is a tendency that the woman strikes the infertile status too. The adoption is an alternative to fulfill her desire of being a mother and, meanwhile, please her husband and guarantee the continuity of her love relationship. Through motherly care, the woman discover herself as a mother, what brings a new meaning for her live, independent of to generate a child. Though, exit frustration, sometimes, in association with suffering, on account of the pregnancy and childbirth absence. The end of the research suggests reflections that to become fulfilled herself as mother, the woman does not need, necessarily, to generate a child, being the maternity one of the uncountable possibilities that are shown, and that she can choose, or not, accomplish it