SIZE AS A LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE II: DIRECT SELECTION ON SIZE OR CORRELATED RESPONSE DUE TO CONSTRAINTS?

Evolutionary change in New World Monkey (NWM) skulls occurred primarily along the line of least resistance defined by size (including allometric) variation (g(max)). Although the direction of evolution was aligned with this axis, it was not clear whether this macroevolutionary pattern results from the conservation of within population genetic covariance patterns (long-term constraint) or long-term selection along a size dimension, or whether both, constraints and selection, were inextricably involved. Furthermore, G-matrix stability can also be a consequence of selection, which implies that both, constraints embodied in g(max) and evolutionary changes observed on the trait averages, would be influenced by selection Here, we describe a combination of approaches that allows one to test whether any particular instance of size evolution is a correlated by-product due to constraints (g(max)) or is due to direct selection on size and apply it to NWM lineages as a case study. The approach is based on comparing the direction and amount of evolutionary change produced by two different simulated sets of net-selection gradients (beta), a size (isometric and allometric size) and a nonsize set. Using this approach it is possible to distinguish between the two hypotheses (indirect size evolution due to constraints or direct selection on size), because although both may produce an evolutionary response aligned with g(max), the amount of change produced by random selection operating through the variance/covariance patterns (constraints hypothesis) will be much smaller than that produced by selection on size (selection hypothesis). Furthermore, the alignment of simulated evolutionary changes with g(max) when selection is not on size is not as tight as when selection is actually on size, allowing a statistical test of whether a particular observed case of evolution along the line of least resistance is the result of selection along it or not. Also, with matrix diagonalization (principal components [PC]) it is possible to calculate directly the net-selection gradient on size alone (first PC [PC1]) by dividing the amount of phenotypic difference between any two populations by the amount of variation in PC1, which allows one to benchmark whether selection was on size or not

When IKEA enters : Do local retailers win or lose?

IKEA is one of the world’s largest retailers, but little is known about how IKEA impact incumbent retailers when deciding to enter a local market. Previous studies on the effects of big-box entry on surrounding retailers have also generated inconclusive results, and mainly been focused towards entry of Wal-Mart in the United States. We contribute to this literature by investigating the effects of IKEA entry on revenues and employment for incumbent retail firms in three Swedish municipalities during 2000-2010. Our results indicate that a new IKEA store increases average revenues for incumbent retailers within the entry municipality by 11%, but also that the effect is highly heterogeneous within the municipality. Retailers that were located up to 1 km from IKEA experienced a 26% increase in revenues when IKEA entered the municipality. However, the positive spillover effect of a new IKEA store on retail revenues diminished with the distance to IKEA, and turned insignificant for retailers in the city centers and those that were located 5-10 km from IKEA. The effects on employment were much less pronounced, and in most cases statistically insignificant.

What affects recognition most – wrong wordstress or wrong word accent?

In an attempt to find out which of the two Swedish prosodic contrasts of 1) wordstress pattern and 2) tonal word accent category has the greatest communicative weight, a lexical decision experiment was conducted: in one part word stress pattern was changed from trochaic to iambic, and in the other part trochaic accentII words were changed to accent I.Native Swedish listeners were asked to decide whether the distorted words werereal words or ‘non-words’. A clear tendency is that listeners preferred to give more‘non-word’ responses when the stress pattern was shifted, compared to when wordaccent category was shifted. This could have implications for priority of phonological features when teaching Swedish as a second language.

Testing the Markov property with ultra high frequency financial data

This paper develops a framework to test whether discrete-valued irregularly-spaced financial transactions data follow a subordinated Markov process. For that purpose, we consider a specific optional sampling in which a continuous-time Markov process is observed only when it crosses some discrete level. This framework is convenient for it accommodates not only the irregular spacing of transactions data, but also price discreteness. Further, it turns out that, under such an observation rule, the current price duration is independent of previous price durations given the current price realization. A simple nonparametric test then follows by examining whether this conditional independence property holds. Finally, we investigate whether or not bid-ask spreads follow Markov processes using transactions data from the New York Stock Exchange. The motivation lies on the fact that asymmetric information models of market microstructures predict that the Markov property does not hold for the bid-ask spread. The results are mixed in the sense that the Markov assumption is rejected for three out of the five stocks we have analyzed.

An essay about the effect of vague accounting standards on the decision making process of auditors

Vague words and expressions are present throughout the standards that comprise the accounting and auditing professions. Vagueness is considered to be a significant source of inexactness in many accounting decision problems and many authors have argued that the neglect of this issue may cause accounting information to be less useful. On the other hand, we can assume that the use of vague terms in accounting standards is inherent to principle based standards (different from rule based standards) and that to avoid vague terms, standard setters would have to incur excessive transaction costs. Auditors are required to exercise their own professional judgment throughout the audit process and it has been argued that the inherent vagueness in accounting standards may influence their decision making processes. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the decision making process of auditors and to investigate whether vague accounting standards create a problem for the decision making process of auditors, or lead to a better outcome. This paper makes the argument that vague standards prompt the use of System 2 type processing by auditors, allowing more comprehensive analytical thinking; therefore, reducing the biases associated with System 1 heuristic processing. If our argument is valid, the repercussions of vague accounting standards are not as negative as presented in previous literature, instead they are positive.

The Brazilian real state market in 2012: robust growth or speculative bubble?

A forte alta dos imóveis no Brasil nos últimos anos iniciou um debate sobre a possível existência de uma bolha especulativa. Dada a recente crise do crédito nos Estados Unidos, é factível questionar se a situação atual no Brasil pode ser comparada à crise americana. Considerando argumentos quantitativos e fundamentais, examina-se o contexto imobiliário brasileiro e questiona-se a sustentabilidade em um futuro próximo. Primeiramente, analisou-se a taxa de aluguel e o nível de acesso aos imóveis e também utilizou-se um modelo do custo real para ver se o mercado está em equilíbrio o não. Depois examinou-se alguns fatores fundamentais que afetam o preço dos imóveis – oferta e demanda, crédito e regulação, fatores culturais – para encontrar evidências que justificam o aumento dos preços dos imóveis. A partir dessas observações tentou-se chegar a uma conclusão sobre a evolução dos preços no mercado imobiliário brasileiro. Enquanto os dados sugerem que os preços dos imóveis estão supervalorizados em comparação ao preço dos aluguéis, há evidências de uma legítima demanda por novos imóveis na emergente classe média brasileira. Um risco maior pode estar no mercado de crédito, altamente alavancado em relação ao consumidor brasileiro. No entanto, não se encontrou evidências que sugerem mais do que uma temporária estabilização ou correção no preço dos imóveis.

A influência da informação háptica do gênero e do conhecimento da categoria nas percepções de risco, qualidade e confiança

A literatura de marketing aponta que os indivíduos diferem quanto à necessidade de tocar os objetos. A informação obtida fazendo uso das mãos – ou informação háptica – é relevante na avaliação dos produtos. Este estudo buscar avaliar se a necessidade de tocar (NFT, do inglês need for touch) afeta a confiança na avaliação do produto à venda, na sua qualidade percebida e no risco percebido com a compra, considerando duas diferentes situações de compra: quando o produto é comprado para uso próprio e quando o produto é comprado como um presente para outra pessoa. Esta pesquisa também examina o efeito moderador do gênero e do conhecimento prévio sobre a categoria de produto. Um experimento foi conduzido usando amostra por conveniência composta de 171 homens e 153 mulheres estudantes de graduação. As escalas foram testadas com análise fatorial confirmatória e atingiram adequação satisfatória. As hipóteses foram testadas usando regressão linear múltipla. A confiança na avaliação foi influenciada positivamente pelo conhecimento do produto e pela situação de compra, sendo maior quando o produto é para uso próprio. A qualidade percebida sofreu os efeitos do conhecimento do produto e do gênero – as mulheres percebem menor qualidade do que os homens. O risco percebido foi influenciado de forma significativa pela situação de compra, sendo maior quando a compra é para presente. Os resultados mostraram que NFT não tem impacto direto no risco percebido, mas por meio da sua interação com o gênero. Portanto, este estudo não encontrou influência direta da NFT nas variáveis dependentes, sugerindo que outros aspectos podem prevalecer sobre os efeitos da NFT nos processos de decisão de compra.

Entry strategies into biosimilars: assessment of entry modes into the field of biosimilars from the perspective of pharmaceuticals, generics and biologics companies

Indústria farmacêutica de hoje está em transição. Como grandes blockbuster drogas estão perdendo ou estão prestes a perder a proteção de patente, e as grandes empresas farmacêuticas não estão substituindo os produtos com novas drogas químicas inovadoras, a indústria busca novas áreas de crescimento. Uma dessas áreas é o mercado de biossimilares, que está sendo inseridos por produtos farmacêuticos, genéricos e empresas de produtos biológicos. Mesmo que o grande potencial de mercado será acordado por volta de 2020, quando importantes blockbusters biológicos perder a proteção de patente, as empresas precisam decidir logo se querem participar ou não devido a elevadas barreiras à entrada técnicos, bem como de desenvolvimento de longo prazos. Como todas as empresas vêm de diferentes origens, compreendem capacidades diferentes e têm diferentes incentivos de entrada, a questão que surge é se esses fatos estão relacionados com as suas estratégias de entrada correspondentes. A tese utiliza estudos de caso de cada segmento da indústria farmacêutica - produtos farmacêuticos, biológicos e genéricos - e examina através de entrevistas semi-estruturadas, por isso que os participantes do estudo de caso entrevistados explicitamente escolhido sua estratégia de entrada. Os dados de entrevistas será então ligada a quadros estratégicos da revisão da literatura e irá ser utilizado para uma comparação global e análise. O estudo revelou que o fundo do participante do mercado que influenciam a sua estratégia de entrada. Os principais pontos de influência derivam tanto as barreiras à entrada, bem como os incentivos de entrada. A tese não é possível determinar o sucesso futuro do modo de entrada analisados no novo mercado.

Work, study, both or neither? time allocation of Brazilian teenagers

Labor force participation among youth is extremely high in Brazil when compared to countries with a similar economic background. In Argentina and Chile labor force participation, among those with 10 to 14 years old, is around 1% while in Brazil this rate is as high as 17 %. For the those between 15 and 19 years old these figures are around 10% in Chile, 15% in Argentina and 53% in Brazil. On the other hand the data on school attendance give a more optimistic picture. The percentage of children, between 10 and 14 years old, enrolled in school increased steadily from 79% to 95% from 1981 to 1998 and with age between 15 and 19, from 46% to 66% in the same period. These figures are close to the ones presented by Chile and Argentina. around 99% among the youngest group and around 70% for the 15 to 19 years old group. The objective of the paper is to understand the determinants of the time allocation decision of the Brazilian youth during the last twenty years. Using a multinomial logit regression we investigate the conditional effect of various micro and macro variables on the time allocation decision for the 1991 to 1998 period. Our main findings are: working and studying became the most likely allocation among the youngest in the poor rural areas and, in general, to study, whether working or not, became less dependent on family background for the youngest group but not for the older.

Buy-or-sell auctions

This paper develops a game theoretic model of a "Buy-or-Sell" auction. Participants have to submit both a bid and an offer price for up to one of the many units of the good being auctioned. The bid-ask spread is set in advance by the auctioneer. Such an auction was used by the Central Bank of Brazil to intervene in the foreign exchange market during the exchange rate crawling-peg regime (1995-1999). I investigate whether such mechanism is more effective than standard intervention auctions to prevent speculative attacks in the context of managed exchange rate regimes.

Time-dependent or state-dependent pricing? Evidence from firms’ response to inflation shocks

This paper proposes a test for distinguishing between time-dependent and state-dependent pricing based on whether the timing of pricing changes is affected by realized or expeted inflation. Using Brazilian data and exploring a large discrepancy between realized and expected inflation in 2002-3, we obtain a strong relation between expected inflation and duration of price spells, but little effect of inflation shocks on the frequency of price adjustment. The results thus support models with timedependent pricing, where the timing for following changes is optimally chosen whenever firms adjust prices

Neutralizing the tendency to the overvaluation of the exchange rate or assuming a foreign constraint and asking for foreign savings

The objectives of these notes are two. The first objective is to analyze whether the strategy of growth with absorption of foreign savings leads to a trajectory of the economy that is sustainable in the long run. The second one is to evaluate the possibility of success of a policy of administered devaluation of the exchange rate in Brazil.

Repercussão geral e súmula vinculante: os efeitos no controle difuso

Brazil since its first republican constitution has adopted systems of laws control. The review activity was given to three state powers or functions state, Executive, Legislative and Judiciary. However, it appears that in the country along the constitutional history, has stood considerably the jurisdictional control of the most important control. Initially, back in 1891, Brazil adopted the jurisdictional control of diffuse from U.S, whose role in monitoring of standards is delivered to all organs of the judiciary, which may face a case, put on trial, ascertain whether or not the possibility of applying a law, removing its impact in case of unconstitutionality. In 1969, entered in the second legal model of judicial review, the concentrated control of constitutionality, whose inspiration comes from the positivist theory of Hans Kelsen, and was adopted by the Austrian Constitution of 1920. According to the abstract control the supervision of law is given to a Court or Constitutional Court, responsible for the analysis of the legal constitutionality independent of its application to a specific case. In Brazil the role of concentrated control was handed over exclusively to the Supreme Court, which serves as the Constitutional Court, which accumulates that function with other constitutionally provided jurisdiction. Throughout this period, from 1891 until today, Brazil has maintained a dual system of judicial control of legal constitutionality, where they coexist and harmonize the diffuse control exercised by any organ of the Judiciary, and concentrated control of competence the Supreme Court. However, one must recognize that with the advent of the Federal Constitution of 1988, the concentrated control has emerged on the national stage due to two important factors: the expansion of the legal capacity to sue and the inclusion of other ways control, besides the already known Direct Claim of Unconstitutionality. This concentrated control and projection of the Supreme Court s attempt to become a true constitutional court, led to a relative weakening of diffuse control even when performed by the Brazilian Constitutional Court. In order to become a true constitutional court, all decisions handed down by the Supreme in the exercise of constitutional jurisdiction should have the same weight and the same measure, or at least bring improvement to similar effects, once is the responsible for the final word when it comes to constitutional interpretation. Thus, the writs of certiorari and stare decisis were responsible for profound changes in the diffuse control, allowing the Supreme Court can strengthen its decisions even in the diffuse control. These two institutions have substantially changed the legal status of diffuse control, allowing an extension of the effects of decisions handed down by the Supreme Court, so that you can no longer be said that the effects of this control to restrict the disputing parties in the process

Vivência de mulheres no puerpério : significado atribuído à revisão pósparto

The consultation for women during the postpartum period should occur between the seventh and tenth days, and 42 days after childbirth, to decrease the incidence of maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality. However, the effectiveness of such assistance in primary health care has not been achieved, especially in the forty-second day of puerperium. Facing this reality, the research aimed to understand the views of women about postpartum consultation. This is an exploratory and descriptive research with qualitative approach, developed in the municipality of Lajes/RN, Brazil, with women inscribed on the four teams that make up the Family Health Strategy. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with 15 women who met the following criteria: be enrolled in ESF; have health mental preserved, have been entered in the Humanization Program of Prenatal and Birth, and that was, at maximum, 60 days postpartum. The data were organized according to the precepts of content analysis according to Bardin, generating three categories: prevention of puerperal complications, feelings related to life changes after childbirth, and postpartum care. This process of coding and categorizing a central theme emerged: the experience of women in the postpartum period. The data were analyzed according to the principles of symbolic interactionism, according to Blumer. The study revealed that the meanings attributed to the postpartum period for prevention of complications were directly related to home, to the consultation and postpartum care provided by family members and health professionals. The interviewees strictly complied with the rest under the influence of the context in which they were entered. But that has not happened with the postpartum revision because few mothers underwent this procedure. Therefore, the interaction of the interviewed people in their living standard as well as the feelings that permeated the post-partum were crucial to consider whether or not the post-partum visit as significant. According to the results, it was noted that disability guidelines and counter-references has impaired the access of women to postpartum review. Thus, further studies are needed on the subject, as well as a reorientation of health care activities in view of the consolidation of postpartum consultation in primary care

Diagnósticos de enfermagem em pacientes submetidos à hemodiálise: semelhanças entre o modelo de adaptação e a NANDA internacional

The nurses in the hemodialysis has an important role in the nursing process implementation, in the context of a theoretical referential. Among the nursing theories, highlights the Roy´s adaptations model, who considers a person as an holistic adaptive system that aims to adapt customers to different living conditions. Thus, it is believed that the Roy´s nursing process will guide nursing care to patients on dialysis. Therefore, the study aimed to analyze the nursing diagnosis present in patients with chronic kidney disease on hemodialysis based on the theoretical model of Roy and NANDA-International. Descriptive and cros-sectional study, performed at a dialysis center in a city in northeastern Brazil. Sample of 178 patients and consecutive sampling by convenience. Data collection ocurred from October/2011 until February/2012, through interview and physical examination forms. Data analysis was initiated by clinical reasoning, diagnosis judgment and similarity relation. Then, the data were entered into SPSS program, 16.0 version, generating descriptive statistics. The project was approved by the Ethics Research Committee (protocol nº 115/11) with a Presentation Certificate for Ethics Appreciation (in 0139.0.051.000-111) and was funded by the Universal edict MCT / CNPq 14/2010. The results revealed that most patients were male (52.2%), married (62.9%) and residents in the Natal´s metropolitan region (54.5%). The mean age was 46.6 years and the years of study, 8,5. Regarding nursing diagnosis obtained an average of 6.6, especially: Risk of Infection (100%), excessive fluid volume (99.4%) and hypothermia (61.8%). On the other hand the adaptive problems average was 6.4, and the most common: intracellular fluid retention (99.4%); Hyperkalemia (64.6%); Hypothermia (61.8%) and edema (53.9%). Were established 20 similarity relations between the NANDA-International nursing diagnosis and adaptive problems of Roy, namely: risk of falls / injury risk and potential for injury, impaired physical mobility and walking mobility and / or restricted coordination, dressing self-care deficit and loss of self-care ability; hypothermia and hypothermia; impaired skin integrity and impaired skin integrity; excessive fluid volume and intracellular fluid retention / Hyperkalemia / Hypocalcemia / edema; imbalanced nutrition: less than body requirements and Nutrition less than the body's needs; constipation and constipation, acute pain and acute pain, chronic pain and chronic pain, sensorial perception disturbed: visual, tactile and auditory disabilities and a primary sense: sight, hearing and tactile; sleep deprivation and insomnia, fatigue and intolerance to activities; ineffective self health and fails in the role; sexual dysfunction and sexual dysfunction; situational low self-esteem and low self-esteem, and diarrhea and diarrhea. We conclude that there is similarity between the typologies and was required a model´s analysis, because they present different ways to establish the nursing diagnosis. Moreover, the nursing process use, under the context of a theory and a classification system, subsidizes the care and contributes to the strengthening of nursing science