The impact of sizeof the firm and exchange rate in the export propensity of domestic and foreign owned firms in a developing country: A study of the Brazilian exporters

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

Determinants of export diversification and sophistication in sub-saharan Africa

This paper studies the political and economic factors that determine successful export diversification (ED) and export sophistication (ES) strategies in the Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries and also the way in which successful ED and sophistication strategies contribute to explain the improving in some of the millennium development goals (MDG). We run separate regressions for the determinants of ES and ED, using disaggregated data of the 48 SSA countries, from 1960 to 2005. The results suggest that better governance is an important determinant for the success of diversification and sophistication strategies in SSA. In particular the level of corruption, transparency and accountability are important factors in limiting or promoting the scope of diversification and the level of sophistication of the exports. The results also suggest that increases in human capital in SSA countries promote both ED and ES, showing that the level of education of the workforce is positively related with ES and ED, with higher levels of education (tertiary) playing a more important role in explaining ES, while lower levels of education (primary) being more important as determinants of ED. In the second part we explore the links between ED and ES and growth presenting evidence that ED and ES are linked to growth stability in SSA. This study also suggests that the Sub-Saharan countries that were more successful in achieving ED and ES tend to be more successful in improving the living conditions of their population. Using different variables of Infant Mortality (one of the MDG) and life expectancy as dependent variables, we present evidence that suggests that in SSA higher ED and ES are associated with lower infant mortality and higher life expectancy. We show that this result is robust, presenting positive and significant results even when a large number of different control variables are introduced, or when fixed effects and instrumental variables are considered. The evidence suggests that ED and ES are part of the solution for a successful development of SSA.

Optimal job design in the presence of implicit contracts

We characterize the optimal job design in a multitasking environment when the firms rely on implicit incentive contracts (i.e., bonus payments). Two natural forms of job design are compared: (i) individual accountability, where each agent is assigned to a particular job and assumes full responsibility for its outcome; and (ii) team accountability, where a group of agents share responsibility for a job and are jointly accountable for its outcome. The key trade-off is that team accountability mitigates the multitasking problem but may weaken the implicit contracts. The optimal job design follows a cut-off rule: firms with high reputation concerns opt for team accountability, whereas firms with low reputation concerns opt for individual accountability. Team accountability is more likely the more acute the multitasking problem is. However, the cut-off rule need not hold if the firm combines implicit incentives with explicit pay-per-performance contracts.

Preventing atomicity violations with contracts

Concurrent programming is a difficult and error-prone task because the programmer must reason about multiple threads of execution and their possible interleavings. A concurrent program must synchronize the concurrent accesses to shared memory regions, but this is not enough to prevent all anomalies that can arise in a concurrent setting. The programmer can misidentify the scope of the regions of code that need to be atomic, resulting in atomicity violations and failing to ensure the correct behavior of the program. Executing a sequence of atomic operations may lead to incorrect results when these operations are co-related. In this case, the programmer may be required to enforce the sequential execution of those operations as a whole to avoid atomicity violations. This situation is specially common when the developer makes use of services from third-party packages or modules. This thesis proposes a methodology, based on the design by contract methodology, to specify which sequences of operations must be executed atomically. We developed an analysis that statically verifies that a client of a module is respecting its contract, allowing the programmer to identify the source of possible atomicity violations.

Promoting Portuguese exports to Germany: A hand-on approach for the machinery and equipment sector

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

Internationalization strategy of Quinta dos Termos to the U.S.A.

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

Promoting Portuguese exports to Germany: An export promotion plan for the machinery & equipment sector

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

How to optimize Lipton’s business model in order to stimulate tea consumption in Portugal and increase Lipton Leaf tea market share?: The importance of distribution and sales channels management in a B2B2C market

Field Lab Entrepreneurial Innovative Ventures

Should Unilever JM export Cornettos to emergent countries?

Field Lab in Entrepreneurial Innovative Ventures

What hides behind the fixed-term contracts wage gap?

In Portugal, about 20% of full-time workers are employed under a fixed-term contract. Using a rich longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset for Portugal, with more than 20 million observations and covering the 2002-2012 period, we confirm the common idea that fixed-term contracts are not desirable when compared to permanent ones, by estimating a conditional wage gap of -1.7 log points. Then, we evaluate the sources of that wage penalty by combining a three way high-dimensional fixed effects model with the decomposition of Gelbach (2014), in which the three dimensions considered are the worker’s unobserved ability, the firm’s compensation wage policy and the job title effect. It is shown that the average worker with a fixed-term contract is less productive than his/her permanent counterparts, explaining -3.92 log points of the FTC wage penalty. Additionally, the sorting of workers into lower-paid job titles is also responsible for -0.59 log points of the wage gap. Surprisingly, we found that the allocation of workers among firms mitigates the existing wage penalty (in 4.23 log points), as fixed-term workers are concentrated into firms with a more generous compensation policy. Finally, following Figueiredo et al. (2014), we further control for the worker-firm match characteristics and reach the conclusion that fixed-term employment relationships have an overrepresentation of low quality worker-firm matches, explaining 0.65 log points of the FTC wage penalty.

Mandinga for export : a globalização da Capoeira

Esta tese de doutoramento resulta de uma investigação antropológica sobre o conceito de mandinga, na prática da capoeira, e a sua importância na globalização desta forma de arte afro-brasileira na Europa. A pesquisa, que foi realizada na Polónia e em Portugal, busca resposta para a seguinte pergunta: Quais os processos geradores da noção atual de mandinga como propriedade imaterial da capoeira, e de que forma a mandinga foi exportada, apropriada e ressignificada nos processos globais da contemporaneidade? A busca por esta resposta compreendeu um trabalho de campo de três anos realizado nos grupos UNICAR (União Internacional de Capoeira Regional) na cidade de Cracóvia, na Polónia, e do Grupo Capoeirarte, na cidade do Porto, em Portugal. Para além de, através do conceito de mandinga, tentar compreender o processo de transnacionalização da capoeira, o trabalho pretende ainda situar a forma como em alguns contextos sociais, culturais e políticos da Europa, os europeus se relacionam com práticas exteriores a sua cultura e, através de processos de ressignificação, se apropriam e nativizam o outro.

How to promote and enhance communication between a big retailer's after-sales department and its suppliers

W is the biggest electronic goods retailer in Portugal accounting with almost fifty percent of market share in its area. During the last years, many small W suppliers had to close their doors, and many others are in huge troubles. Among the reason for this situation, the huge bargaining power of W in the relationship seems crucial. The focus of the directed research will be in the after sales department where I did an internship from September 2014 to January 2015.

Optimization of export support systems: How to promote exports from Portugal to Germany in the area of information technology and electronics

This work project focuses on developing new approaches which enhance Portuguese exports towards a defined German industry sector within the information technology and electronics fields. Firstly and foremost, information was collected and a set of expert and top managers’ interviews were performed in order to acknowledge the demand of the German market while identifying compatible Portuguese supply capabilities. Among the main findings, Industry 4.0 presents itself as a valuable opportunity in the German market for Portuguese medium sized companies in the embedded systems area of expertise for machinery and equipment companies. In order to achieve the purpose of the work project, an embedded systems platform targeting machinery and equipment companies was suggested as well as it was developed several recommendations on how to implement it. An alternative approach for this platform was also considered within the German market namely the eHealth sector having the purpose of enhancing the current healthcare service provision.

Optimization of export support systems

The present paper is a personal reflection on a work project carried out to promote exports from Portugal to Germany in the IT area, under consideration of the deliverables required by the clients CCILA and Anetie. The project outcome approaches the fact that the majority of the Portuguese market players has disadvantages in size and does rarely coordinate activities among each other, which hinders them to export successfully on a broad scale. To bring together Portuguese delivery potential and German market demand, expert interviews were conducted. Based on the findings, a concept was developed to overcome the domestic collaboration issues in order to strengthen the national exports in the identified sector - embedded systems implementation services for machinery and equipment companies.

Increasing sales volume in mass business through inbound contact center

Field lab: Consulting lab