Changes in the Distribution of Household Income in Brazil: The Role of Male and Female Earnings

Annual survey data spanning three decades and a non-parametric technique for constructing counterfactual distributions are employed to analyze the relationship between earnings and the distribution of household income in Brazil. Results show that significant changes in the structure of female earnings reflecting rising wages and participation rates had limited equalizing consequences but considerable poverty-reducing effects. These developments counterbalanced poverty-increasing changes in the structure of male earnings. A stable macroeconomic environment was associated with a consistent but a limited fall in inequality and a strong decline in poverty mainly related to rising earnings among women at the lower end of the household income distribution.     

Financial Structure of Farm Businesses Under Imperfect Capital Markets

Recent finance studies have considered whether gaps between a firm's costs of internal and external sources of investment funds, arising from capital market imperfections, influence its investment behavior and funding preferences. This study tests the applicability of the pecking order and partial adjustment theories of financial structure to farm businesses by fitting a set of simultaneous financial equations with farm panel data from Illinois. Model results indicate that Illinois farms adjust to long-run financial targets for equity, debt, and leasing, but that additional financing needs follow a pecking order that is stronger for farms with greater asymmetric information problems.     

Connecting the cooperative and competitive structures of the multiple-partners assignment game

Multiple-partners assignment game is the name used by Sotomayor [The multiple partners game, in: M. Majumdar (Ed.), Equilibrium and Dynamics: Essays in Honor of David Gale, The Macmillan Press Ltd., New York, 1992; The lattice structure of the set of stable outcomes of the multiple partners assignment game, Int. J. Game Theory 28 (1999) 567-583] to describe the cooperative structure of the many-to-many matching market with additively separable utilities. Stability concept is proved to be different from the core concept. An economic structure is proposed where the concept of competitive equilibrium payoff is introduced in connection to the equilibrium concept from standard microeconomic theory. The paper examines how this equilibrium concept compares with the cooperative equilibrium concept. Properties of interest to the cooperative and competitive markets are derived.     

The ethical implications of collecting data in educational settings: discussion on the technology and engineering attitude scale (TEAS) and its psychometric validation for assessing a pre-engineering design program

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - K-12 Engineering Education has placed a lot of attention on students’ attitudes or predispositions towards science and technology....