Critical Success Factors of Brazilian Business Incubators

The main purpose of this study is to determine the Critical Success Factors (CSF) of Brazilian business incubator management and understand how they are structured. These factors are essential to improve the performance of these Brazilian businesses and to strengthening the Brazilian entrepreneurial ecosystem. The strategy used was survey, and the data obtained were analyzed using the statistical technique of Exploratory Factor Analysis. The validated CSF were grouped into seven constructs. Thus far, the literature does not present any article within the scope proposed here. Additionally, the statistical technique used here is applied for the first time in this theme.     

Inequality and the Phases of Capitalism

We live in a capitalist world characterized by economic inequality. Inequality is a real curse, but it does not have to always increase. In different phases of capitalism, it may be increasing, constant, or decreasing, depending on the dominant type of technical progress (capital-using, capital-neutral, or capital-saving), on the organizational capacity of the workers, on the competition from other countries with lower wages, and on the prevailing degree of democracy. But distribution faces an economic constraint: the expected profit rate must remain attractive to business entrepreneurs. From the mid-twentieth century, we would expect technological progress to change from neutral to capital-saving, which would allow wages to increase at a faster rate than productivity. Indeed, this happened in the Golden Years of capitalism, but such progress stalled in the succeeding neoliberal years, dominated as they were by a class coalition of rentier capitalists and financiers.     

Replacing Corporate Income Tax with a Cash Flow Tax

We design a parsimonious cash flow tax for Australia and estimate revenue effects. It allows immediate deduction of all capital expenditures, denies deductions of interest payments, and compensates negative cash flows at the same rate and time as it taxes positive cash flows. It allows taxpayer timing choice on implementation over 10 years. It has incentive effects comparable to lowering the corporate income tax rate to zero. It removes distortions that artificially favour debt over equity, short- over long-term investments, rents over competitive returns, large, established over small and new businesses, and conventional over innovative investments. It closes international tax evasion loopholes. Its spur to investment and timing of revenue impacts favours implementation in recession.     

Why do entrepreneurs open tech startups? A comparative study between Brazilian and foreign enterprises

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - This research identifies and compares the reasons that lead entrepreneurs to open a startup in Brazil or abroad along six factors:...     

The value of switching inputs in a biodiesel production plant

There has been a growing concern in recent years about the quality of the environment and dependence on fossil fuels to supply the world's energy needs, which has created an interest in the development of renewable and less polluting energy sources. One of these alternatives is the biodiesel fuel, which has many advantages over the fossil based diesel, or petro diesel. In this paper we use the real options approach to determine the value of the managerial flexibility embedded in a biodiesel plant that has the option to switch inputs among two different grain commodities. Our results indicate that the option to choose inputs has significant value if we assume that future prices follow stochastic processes such as Geometric Brownian Motion and Mean Reversion Models, and can be sufficient to recommend the use of input commodities that would not be optimal under traditional valuation methods. We also show that the choice of model and parameters has a significant impact on the valuation of this class of projects.     

Corruption and industrial dualism in less developed countries

This paper provides an explanation for the observation that developing countries tend to have a higher degree of dualism in the size distribution of firms and a relatively smaller proportion of large firms than do developed countries. This paper builds a model where large 'formal' firms attract rent seeking activities from the government while small firms do not. In the model, there exists a 'competitive fringe' of small firms and a formal market consisting of Cournot competitors. The number of formal firms is made endogenous and is a function of the degree to which the government can extract rents. This ability to extract rents is itself posited as a function of the degree of corruption in a country's government. Thus, it is the high degree of corruption in developing country governments that contributes to the dual nature of their industrial structure. The model predicts that the higher the degree of corruption, the fewer (and larger) are the formal firms, the lower is social welfare and the greater is dead-weight loss, and the higher are government rents. An examination of the size distribution of 16 countries and their degree of corruption shows that the degree of corruption is a good predictor of the percentage of large firms in an economy.     

Further investigation of the uncertain trend in US GDP

The presence of deterministic or stochastic trend in US GDP has been a continuing debate in the literature of macroeconomics. Ben-David and Papell (1995 Ben-David, D and Papell, DH. 1995. The great wars, the great crash, and steady growth: some new evidence about an old stylized. Journal of Monetary Economics, 36: 453–75. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) found evidence in favour of trend stationarity using the secular sample of Maddison (1991 Maddison, A. 1991. Dynamics Forces in Capitalist Development: A Long-Run Comparative View, Oxford: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar]). More recently, Murray and Nelson (2000 Murray, CJ and Nelson, CR. 2000. The uncertain trend in U.S. GDP. Journal of Monetary Economics, 46: 79–95. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) correctly criticized this finding arguing that the Maddision data are plagued with additive outliers (AO), which bias inference towards stationarity. Hence, they propose to set the secular sample aside and conduct inference using a more homogeneous but shorter time-span post-WWII sample. In this article we re-visit the Maddison data by employing a test that is robust against AO's. Our results suggest the US GDP can be modelled as trend stationary process     

Non-monotonic pricing kernel and an extended class of mixture of distributions for option pricing

We derive closed form European option pricing formulae under the general equilibrium framework for underlying assets that have an \(N\) -mixture of transformed normal distributions. The component distributions need not belong to the same class but must all be transformed normal. An important implication of our results is that the mixture of distributions is consistent with a “what appears to be abnormal” non-monotonic (asset specific) pricing kernel for the S&P 500 and that the representative agent has a “logical” monotonic decreasing marginal utility. We show that a mixture of two lognormal distributions is sufficient to produce this result and also implied volatility smiles of a wide variety of shapes.     

Inflation targeting in Brazil

The purpose of this paper is to examine the Inflation Targeting (IT) framework as it is applied in the case of Brazil since its adoption in June 1999. For this purpose we first summarize the macroeconometric model utilized by the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) in its pursuit of the IT framework. While the focus of this paper is on Brazil, we also examine the experience of other countries with IT (in particular, the BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India, and China), both for comparative purposes and for evidence of the extent of success of this ‘new’ economic policy pursued by other IT countries. In addition, we compare the experience of Brazil with IT and with that of non‐IT countries. In the context of non‐IT countries, we ask the question of whether it makes a difference in the fight against inflation whether a country has adopted IT or not. Finally, we examine some features of the Brazilian experience with IT regime.     

Success chess

Too many managers and executives play at the game of success rather than play a strategy to win. There are rules for effective career management that increase value to both the corporation and the individual.