Globalization and the Industrial Revolution (revised)

This paper argues that trade specialization played an indispensable role in supporting the Industrial Revolution. We calibrate a two-good and two-sector overlapping generations model to Englandís historical development and investigate how much different Englandís development path would have been if it had not globalized in 1840. The open-economy model is able to closely match the data, but the closed-economy model cannot explain the fall in the value of land relative to wages observed in the 19th century. Without globalization, the transition period in the British economy would be considerably longer than that observed in the data and key variables, such as the share of labor force in agriculture, would have converged to Ögures very distant from the actual ones.

Utilizando estimadores entrópicos generalizados na estimação de modelos de apreçamento de ativos

Este trabalho analisa as propriedades de uma nova medida de má especificação de modelos de apreçamento, que está relacionada com o tamanho do ajuste multiplicativo necessário para que o modelo seja corretamente especificado. A partir disso, caracterizamos o parâmetro que minimiza a medida a partir de um programa dual, de solução mais simples. Os estimadores naturais para esse parâmetro pertencem à classe de Generalized Empirical Likelihood. Derivamos as propriedades assintóticas deste estimador sob a hipótese de má especificação. A metodologia é empregada para estudar como se comportam em amostras finitas as estimativas de aversão relativa ao risco em uma economia de desastres quando os estimadores estão associados a nossa medida de má especificação. Nas simulações vemos que em média a aversão ao risco é superestimada, mesmo quando ocorre um número significativo de desastres.

Empresa na favela: políticas públicas e desafios

Desde o seu surgimento, as favelas no Rio de Janeiro foram, ao longo dos anos, foco de diferentes políticas públicas desenvolvidas pelos governantes. Primeiramente a ênfase dessas políticas foi pautada na questão da remoção das favelas, pois eram consideradas verdadeiras aberrações que necessitavam ser erradicadas. Com o passar dos anos nota-se uma grande mudança. O discurso de valorização da urbanização das favelas ganha força e o remocionismo parece ficar um pouco esquecido. Entretanto, a partir do ano de 2009, vemos que a agenda pública passa a dar grande ênfase ao fomento do empreendedorismo nas favelas, já que este é visto como um importante fator de geração de riquezas e combate da pobreza. Para isso, foram criados diferentes projetos por parte do poder público e da iniciativa privada que visam fomentar a iniciativa empreendedora nas favelas. Entretanto, como será exposto através de algumas entrevistas que foram realizadas com empreendedoras da favela do Cantagalo, estes projetos apresentam algumas barreiras e desafios que precisam ser vencidos para que possam servir à finalidade para a qual foram criados e para que sejam mais efetivos.

Desafios para a regulação de um mercado competitivo de gás natural no estado de São Paulo

O trabalho tem o objetivo de apresentar os principais desafios e algumas propostas para a formação e regulação de um mercado de gás natural mais competitivo no Estado de São Paulo. São descritos, caracterizados e analisados os principais pontos do estudo: a estrutura da indústria, aspectos econômicos, a regulação do setor, e aprendizados de algumas experiências internacionais. Posteriormente, são oferecidas alternativas que poderiam servir como possibilidades para o desenvolvimento de um mercado de livre concorrência mais amplo.

A monthly indicator of Brazilian GDP. The Brazilian business cycle and growth cycle

This paper constructs an indicator of Brazilian GDP at the monthly ftequency. The peculiar instability and abrupt changes of regimes in the dynamic behavior of the Brazilian business cycle were explicitly modeled within nonlinear ftameworks. In particular, a Markov switching dynarnic factor model was used to combine several macroeconomic variables that display simultaneous comovements with aggregate economic activity. The model generates as output a monthly indicator of the Brazilian GDP and real time probabilities of the current phase of the Brazilian business cycle. The monthly indicator shows a remarkable historical conformity with cyclical movements of GDP. In addition, the estimated filtered probabilities predict ali recessions in sample and out-of-sample. The ability of the indicator in linear forecasting growth rates of GDP is also examined. The estimated indicator displays a better in-sample and out-of-sample predictive performance in forecasting growth rates of real GDP, compared to a linear autoregressive model for GDP. These results suggest that the estimated monthly indicator can be used to forecast GDP and to monitor the state of the Brazilian economy in real time.

Effects of trade policy on technology adoption and investment

This paper studies the consequences of trade policy for the adoption of new technologies. It develops a dynamic international trade model with two sectors. Workers in manufacturing decide if new technologies are used, capital owners then choose investment. We analyze three different arrangements: free trade, tariffs, and quotas. In the model economy, free trade as well as tariffs guarantee that the most productive technology available will be used. In contrasL under a quota the most productive technology available will not be used at all times. Further, in the latter case investment and the capital stock are smaller than in the former one. Finally, there exists parameter values for which the computed difference in GDP is a factor of thirty.

Formation and destruction of coalition groups under economic growth

This paper introduces a model economy in which formation of coalition groups under technological progress is generated endogenously. The coalition formation depends crucially on the rate of arrival of new technologies. In the model, an agent working in the saroe technology for more than one period acquires skills, part of which is specific to this technology. These skills increase the agent productivity. In this case, if he has worked more than one period with the same technology he has incentives to construct a coalition to block the adoption of new technologies. Therefore, in every sector the workers have incentives to construct a coalition and to block the adoption of new technologies. They will block every time that a technology stay in use for more than one period.

Income composition, endogenous fertility and schooling investments in children

This paper studies how the eomposition of ineome between mothers and fathers affeets fertility and sehooling investments in ehildren, using data from the 1976 and 1996 PNAD, a Brazilian household survey. Ineome composition affeets the time eost of fertility because mothers and fathers alloeate different amounts of time to child-rearing. These effects are in turn transmitted to investments in ehildren through a tradeoffbetween quantity and quality of ehildren. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it derives new implications about the relationship between household ineome composition and schooling investments in ehildren. Seeond, this paper devises and implements an empirieal approaeh to assess these implieations, using two eross-seetions of fertility and schooling data from Brazil. The main empirical findings of the paper ean be summarized as follows. First, the empirical analysis shows that a larger negative effect of the mother's labor in come on fertility in 1996 is associated with a larger positive effect on the adult child's schooling, refleeting the interaction between quantity and quality of children. Second, the larger negative effect of the mother's labor income on fertility in 1996 is associated with a reduction in the effect of other determinants of number of children. This suggests that an increase in the relative importanee of time costs of fertility may be an important determinant of variations in fertility over time in Brazil and other developing countries .

Technology adoption and effects of transfers across locations

This paper develops a two-period model with heterogeneous agents to analyze the e¤ects of transfers across locations on convergence, growth and welfare. The model has two important features. First, locations are asymmetric as it is assumed that there are more specialized occupations in the more developed one. Second, the returns on the investment to acquire new technology depend positively on the level of each region’s knowledge and on the level of the world knowledge assumed to be available to all. In one hand, the poor region has a disadvantage as it has a lower stock of knowledge. On the other hand, it has the advantage of not having yet exploited a greater stock of useable knowledge available in the world. Hence, there are two possible cases. When the returns are greater in the poor region, we obtain the following results: (i) the rich location grows slower; (ii) the transfers to the poor location enhances the country’s growth rate; and (iii) there is a positive amount of transfers to the poor region that is welfare improving. When the returns are greater in the rich region, the …rst two results are reversed and transfers to the rich region are welfare improving. In both cases, the optimal amount of transfer increases with the level of income disparity across regions and is not dependent on the level of the country’s economic development (measured by its income per capita). Barriers to the adoption of new technology available in the world can constrain the convergence process as it harms in greater length the poor region. The results do not change whether migration is allowed or not.

Generalists versus specialists in organizations

In this paper, we discuss the trade-o¤ between specialization and coordination in an organizational design problem. Most papers on the assignment of heterogeneous managers to di¤erent hierarchic levels emphasize the role of talent: better managers should be on top of hierarchies. However, this requires talent to be measured on an one-dimensional scale. In this paper, we explore the implications of allowing talent to have two dimensions: breadth and depth. Specialists have deep knowledge of few areas while generalists have narrow knowledge of many areas. When perfect communication is impossible, hierarchies arise in which generalists are at the top and specialists are at the bottom. We propose a model of imperfect communication and discuss its implications for organizational design, the optimal degree of centralization and the depth of hierarchies. We show that our model also implies plausible organizational structures, like balanced hierarchies and pyramidal structures.

Conditional cash transfers, schooling and child labor : micro-simulating bolsa escola

Cash transfers targeted to poor people, but conditional on some behavior on their part, such as school attendance or regular visits to health care facilities, are being adopted in a growing number of developing countries. Even where ex-post impact evaluations have been conducted, a number of policy-relevant counterfactual questions have remained unanswered. These are questions about the potential impact of changes in program design, such as benefit levels or the choice of the means-test, on both the current welfare and the behavioral response of household members. This paper proposes a method to simulate the effects of those alternative program designs on welfare and behavior, based on microeconometrically estimated models of household behavior. In an application to Brazil’s recently introduced federal Bolsa Escola program, we find a surprisingly strong effect of the conditionality on school attendance, but a muted impact of the transfers on the reduction of current poverty and inequality levels.

Technical change and factor shares

The implications of technical change that directly alters factor shares are examined. Such change can lower the income of some factors of production even when it raises total output, thus offering a possible explanation for episodes of social conflict such as the Luddite uprisings in 19th century England and the recent divergence in the U. S. between wages for skilled and unskilled labor. An explanation also why underdeveloped countries do not adopt the latest technology but continue to use outmoded production methods. Total factor productivity is shown to be a misleading measure of technical progress. Share-altering technical change brings into question the plausibility of a wide class of endogenous growth models.

Monopoly rights can reduce income big time

We study a two–sector version of the neoclassical growth model with coalitions of factor suppliers in the capital producing sectors. We show that if the coalitions have monopoly rights, then they block the adoption of the efficient technology. We also show that blocking leads to a decrease in the productivity of each capital producing sector and to an increase in the relative price of capital; as a result the capital stock and the production fall in each sector. We finally show that the implied fall in the level of per–capita income can be large quantitatively.