Fashion consumer profiles in the Portuguese market: involvement,innovativeness, self‐expression and impulsiveness as segmentation criteria

This study identified fashion consumer profiles among Portuguese young adults. The work was based on four constructs: fashion involvement, fashion innovativeness, self‐expression through fashion products and impulsiveness. Another purpose of this study was to test these instruments in this cultural context in order to contribute to the generalizability of the scales. A cluster analysis uncovered three groups: Moderates, Apathetic and Enthusiasts. On the whole, this study proposes a new way of segmenting Portuguese fashion consumers and demonstrates that the four constructs employed can be used in different cultural contexts.     

Frontier markets’ efficiency: mutual information and detrended fluctuation analyses

This study tests weak form efficiency in frontier markets. Mutual information and detrended fluctuation analyses are performed to assess global correlation and long range dependence in the stock markets of twenty three countries. The results indicate that Slovenia is the only case where there is evidence compatible with weak form efficiency. The relatively less inefficient markets are mainly located in Europe and America, and the relatively more inefficient mainly in the Middle East. This information is useful for investors, but also for the assessed countries’ regulators as they indicate that relevant impediments are preventing the exploitation of potential profitable opportunities.

     

The origins of modern accounting in Brazil: Influences leading to the adoption of IFRS

Despite the increasing importance of Brazil, there has been little documentation of how accounting developed and about the significant formative influences involved. This paper explores the significant influences on Brazilian accounting and the path to the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Several important influences are emphasized: the equity theory of the Italian school of accounting in the early 20th century; the birth of the Brazilian accounting profession in 1931 and the certified accountants association in 1946; the impact of US trade and American accounting in the 1950s; and the high rates of inflation that occurred from the beginning of the 1960s. Modern Brazilian accounting had its beginning in the 1970s with the development of the stock market, the reforms of the financial system, and the decrease of tax influences on accounting. The globalization process and the need for Brazilian accounting to converge with international accounting led to the decision to adopt IFRS in 2007.     

Serial defaults, serial profits: Returns to sovereign lending in Habsburg Spain, 1566–1600

Philip II of Spain accumulated debts equivalent to 60% of GDP. He also defaulted four times on his short-term loans, thus becoming the first serial defaulter in history. Contrary to a common view in the literature, we show that lending to the king was profitable even under worst-case scenario assumptions. Lenders maintained long-term relationships with the crown. Losses sustained during defaults were more than compensated by profits in normal times. Defaults were not catastrophic events. In effect, short-term lending acted as an insurance mechanism, allowing the king to reduce his payments in harsh times in exchange for paying a premium in tranquil periods.     

Product Innovation in Resource‐Poor Environments: Three Research Streams

We explore the role and relevance of resource scarcity in product innovation. The literature tends to assume that the development of new products requires resource sufficiency for the process to be conducted systematically. But we are also taught that necessity is the mother of invention and that resource scarcity may be a trigger of innovation in adverse contexts. In this discussion, we organize the literature on product innovation in resource‐poor contexts in three streams. The paper contributes to a finer‐grained understanding of the role of scarcity in product innovation and suggests that creative approaches to scarcity may contribute to knowledge enrichment of product innovation theory and practice.     

Institutional quality and capital taxation

We describe the preferred taxation regime in a small economy with uncertain institutional quality. We obtain that a preferential taxation regime in which taxes can be matched to the mobility of the tax base may be worse off than a non-preferential taxation regime in which taxes are constant across bases with distinct mobility. Since the small economy takes foreign taxes as given, our result is not driven by a downward pressure on revenues caused by unconstrained tax competition. It is instead related to the ability of a non-preferential taxation regime to credibly convey information about the institutional quality of the small economy. We present some empirical evidence which corroborates our results.     

On the general equilibrium costs of perfectly anticipated inflation

In monetary models where M0 has no social costs and a positive demand for cash and deposits is taken as a primitive, we show that the compensating variation in endowment is the exact general equilibrium measure of welfare costs of perfectly anticipated inflation. As a consequence, we show that a good approximation to the welfare costs of inflation is given by the area under the compensated demand for M0, a result that brings us back to Bailey (J Polit Econ 64:93–110, 1956). The estimated welfare costs of inflation are bounded at less than a quarter of a percent of the GDP for the U.S. economy.      

The luck of being of the right gender and color: a detailed discussion about the wage gaps in the Brazilian manufacturing industry

Quality & Quantity - This work analyzed the wage discrimination in the Brazilian manufacturing industry. By recurring to the most updated database, several gaps were analyzed between white and...