EconomiA最新文献

Modern innovation activity is the product of cooperation between people, companies, and regions rather than a solitary activity performed by the traditional garage inventor. Empirical studies on cooperative innovation highlight three major types of proximities that enable tie-formation: geographical, cognitive, and social or relational proximities. Our paper aims to investigate the determinants of network formations between Brazilian regions between 2000 and 2011. We use the patent database from the National Institute of Intellectual Property (INPI) to create a network of inter-regional co-patenting in Brazil. The main results indicate that: (1) geography still plays a fundamental role in forming networks; (2) the network and its subcomponents are spatially concentrated; (3) there is an unequal geographical agglomeration pattern in the Brazilian invention system and (4) technological and relational proximity are important factors in determining new connections.

In third generation currency crises models, balance sheet losses from currency depreciations propagate the crises into the real sector of the economy. To test these models, we built a firm-level database that allowed us to measure currency mismatches around the 2002 Brazilian currency crisis. We found that between 2001 and 2003, firms with large currency mismatches just before the crisis reduced their investment rates 8.1 percentage points more than other publicly held firms. We also showed that the currency depreciation increased exporters revenue, but those with currency mismatches reduced investments 12.5 percentage points more than other exporters. These estimated reductions in investment are economically very significant, underscoring the importance of negative balance sheet effects in currency crises.

We aim to evaluate two different econometric screens for identifying anti-competitive behavior in the fuel retail market: (i) The Markov-Switching GARCH (MS-GARCH) Models; (ii) The Local Gaussian Correlation (LGC) approach. Using the gasoline cartel judged and condemned in Brasília as a benchmark, our results indicate that the LGC model, based on the correlation of the resale price margin and price variability, may provide a biased likelihood as well as an incorrect identification of cartel behavior over time. The MSGARCH model, based only on the log deviation of the average gasoline sales price, showed better accuracy in cartel detection.

What are the determinants of creativity, novelty, and innovation? In this paper I explore this question through an analysis of data from the Song Explorer podcast, where composers describe how they created a specific song. I mine their accounts to classify their processes into seven different, but not mutually exclusive, theories of the creative process. The result of this exercise suggests that the recombination of existing songs is a major process for the creation of new successful songs. The second step uses the average number of daily YouTube views per day since the songs’ video release as a measure of the song’s impact, and tests how this impact is associated with the seven theories. For each song in the sample, I have one or more other songs which were explicitly indicated as an influence or inspiration. I use the music genre classification system Every Noise at Once, that provides a map of over 1800 genres and millions of songs to create a set of descriptive statistics of the similarity of each song to their inspiration-songs. These statistics are used to measure different recombination strategies in a regression that seeks to explain songs’ relative success, while controlling for other determinants, such as the artists’ established level of popularity. The results confirm the optimal differentiation hypothesis that the simultaneous presence of conventionality together with novelty, and not just one or the other, is a major determinant of creativity and success.

This paper looks for evidence of learning-by-exporting effects on firms’ average wages and its interaction with human capital level and export destination. This interaction allows us to test the hypothesis that a wage premium for exporting firms should mainly be found in firms employing high-skilled labor. The analysis is based on panel data for the 2010–2013 period and approximately 305,000 south Brazilian firms. We explore different times of entry into export market to use a fixed effects specification. Our results show that on average there are no learning-by-exporting effects on average wages for firms in our sample. However, when interacting firms export status with its human capital level, the effects turn out to be statistically significant. Finally, results suggest that the interaction between export gains and firms’ human capital level is driven by firms exporting to developing countries. We explain this last result by the following mechanism. Low wage countries mainly produce low quality goods. Therefore, firms employing high skilled labor can differentiate their products and consequently escape from intense competition from these countries in the foreign market, obtaining higher export gains.

The ANPEC exam has been an important instrument for the Brazilian academic economics since the 1970s. Nowadays, practically all graduate program in economics uses it as selection mechanism. This research has tabulated its microdata to produce a picture of what these numbers can reveal about recent past. The main highlights are: master courses demand and supply are numerically closer; students’ profiles are not changing, mostly they are white men; many candidates seems to answer at random; outcomes in EB test are little correlated with other results; an applicant needs to correctly answer at least three questions (out of 15) in each test to be selected in most programs; many well-ranked students are not selected anywhere; candidates tend to stay in their home states; and, applicants’ motivations and expectations are ambiguous.

This paper investigates the existence of asymmetric transmission from industrial costs to prices (IPA/FGV) in Brazil from 1996 to 2014. We construct cost indices based on intermediate consumption of industrial activities from the National Accounts (SCN/IBGE). The paper estimates symmetric and asymmetric SVAR models for 21 industrial activities using a decomposition of industrial costs into positive and negative changes. The results of the pass-through estimates indicate that the magnitude of the cost pass-through is heterogeneous among industrial activities. The estimates and Wald tests on the asymmetrical model coefficients show that most industrial activities exhibit positive asymmetric price transmission, i.e., cost increases have a larger pass-through rate than cost decreases.

Studies on the history of economic thought of American institutionalism usually focus on the founding fathers, or pre-1930s institutionalism. The decline in importance of this school of thought during the 1930s resulted in few post-World War II studies on the history of institutionalism. However, institutionalists played a prominent role in the emergence of dissenting associations. In the late 1950s, institutionalists’ dissatisfaction with the American Economic Association culminated in the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) in 1965. Allan Gruchy was a founder of the AFEE, and this paper highlights his perspective of institutionalism and how it changed over the course of his career because of his involvement in AFEE’s internal affairs.

Recent empirical studies argue that traditional trade models ignore product quality, usually leading to bias in price elasticities, which prevents the correct evaluation of trade determinants and the development of trade policies. This article quantifies the effect of quality on Brazilian imports. For that, we estimate import demand equations, including a proxy for the quality of imported goods, according to pooled data panel. Results show that price affects the demand for Brazilian imports more than quality, unlike literature results in developed countries. Introducing the quality proxy increased the price coefficient. This occurred more significantly in estimates for the manufacturing sector, supporting the hypothesis of elasticities bias when estimation does not consider product differentiation.

In this article, it is explored whether quota students who were enrolled in presential courses at federal institutions between 2009 and 2012 and received PNAES (National Student Support Program) Bolsa Permanência dropped out less than those quota students who did not receive this benefit. For this analysis, it was used data collected from the Tertiary Education Census and the Difference in Differences approach to look at how different characteristics influence the dropout rate and the chances that a student will receive a Bolsa Permanência. Results show that the chances of receiving the benefit depends on individual and school characteristics, and that the dropout rate among aid recipients is lower than among those who did not receive the benefit.