Government bond yield spreads in EMU countries: The story of an ephemeral convergence

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

Determinants of the Portuguese government bond yield spread

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

Humor and the framing of the public sphere and public opinion in Portugal (1797-1834)

In his Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment (1784), Kant puts forward his belief that the vocation to think freely, which humankind is endowed with, is bound to make sure that “the public use of reason” will at last act “even on the fundamental principles of government and the state [will] find it agreeable to treat man – who is now more than a machine – in accord with his dignity”. The critical reference to La Mettrie (1747), by opposing the machine to human dignity, will echo, in the dawn of the 20th century, in Bergson’s attempt to explain humor. Besides being exclusive to humans, humor is also a social phenomenon. Freud (1905) assures that pleasure originated by humor is collective, it results from a “social process”: jokes need an audience, a “third party”, in order to work and have fun. Assuming humor as a social and cultural phenomenon, this paper intends to sustain that it played a role in the framing of the public sphere and of public opinion in Portugal during the transition from Absolute Monarchy to Liberalism. The search for the conditions which made possible the critical exercise of sociability is at the root of the creation of the public sphere in the sense developed by Habermas (1962), whose perspective, however, has been questioned by those who point 2 out the alleged idealism of the concept – as opposed, for example, to Bakhtin (1970), whose work stresses diversity and pluralism. This notwithstanding, the concept of public sphere is crucial to the building of public opinion, which is, in turn, indissoluble from the principle of publicity, as demonstrated by Bobbio (1985). This paper discusses the historical evolution of the concept of public opinion from Ancient Greece doxa, through Machiavelli’s “humors” (1532), the origin of the expression in Montaigne (1580) and the contributions of Hobbes (1651), Locke (1690), Swift (1729), Rousseau (1762) or Hume (1777), up to the reflection of Lippman (1922) and Bourdieu’s critique (1984). It maintains that humor, as it appears in Portuguese printed periodicals from 1797 (when Almocreve de Petas was published for the first time) to the end of the civil war (1834) – especially in those edited by José Daniel Rodrigues da Costa but also in O Piolho Viajante, by António Manuel Policarpo da Silva, or in the ones written by José Agostinho de Macedo, as well as in a political “elite minded” periodical such as Correio Braziliense –, contributed to the framing of the public sphere and of public opinion in Portugal.

Fiscal adjustments and sovereign default in different government systems

This paper extends the model of Spolaore (2004) about adjustments in di erent government systems for the context of scal adjustments and sovereign default. We introduce asymmetry between groups in income and preferences towards scal reforms. Default a ects di erently each group and becomes a possibility if reforms are not enacted after public nance solvency shocks, in uencing the political game according to its likelihood. With the extensions, new situations which were not possible with the previous framework arise. After the exposition of the model, the Argentine default in 2001 provides an example of the political con icts addressed by the model.

Politically driven cycles in fiscal policy: in depth analysis of the functional components of government expenditures

NIPE - WP 02/2016

Enquadramento para a compreensão dos impactos do Open Government Data

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia e Gestão de Sistemas de Informação

E-government e participação política em Portugal

Dissertação de Mestrado em MPA - Administração Pública

Report to the government of Baroda on the marine zoology of Okhamandal in Kattiawar, by James Hornell ... With supplementary reports on special groups by other zoologists ...

pt. 2

Report to the government of Baroda on the marine zoology of Okhamandal in Kattiawar, by James Hornell ... With supplementary reports on special groups by other zoologists ...

pt. 1

Icones plantarum formosanarum nec non et contributiones ad floram formosanam : or, Icones of the plants of Formosa, and materials for a flora of the island, based on a study of the collections of the Botanical survey of the Government of Formosa / By B. Hayata ...

8

Icones plantarum formosanarum nec non et contributiones ad floram formosanam : or, Icones of the plants of Formosa, and materials for a flora of the island, based on a study of the collections of the Botanical survey of the Government of Formosa / By B. Hayata ...

7

Icones plantarum formosanarum nec non et contributiones ad floram formosanam : or, Icones of the plants of Formosa, and materials for a flora of the island, based on a study of the collections of the Botanical survey of the Government of Formosa / By B. Hayata ...

1

Icones plantarum formosanarum nec non et contributiones ad floram formosanam : or, Icones of the plants of Formosa, and materials for a flora of the island, based on a study of the collections of the Botanical survey of the Government of Formosa / By B. Hayata ...

3

Icones plantarum formosanarum nec non et contributiones ad floram formosanam : or, Icones of the plants of Formosa, and materials for a flora of the island, based on a study of the collections of the Botanical survey of the Government of Formosa / By B. Hayata ...

4

Icones plantarum formosanarum nec non et contributiones ad floram formosanam : or, Icones of the plants of Formosa, and materials for a flora of the island, based on a study of the collections of the Botanical survey of the Government of Formosa / By B. Hayata ...

6