Opportunities to Improve Entrepreneurship Education: Contributions Considering Brazilian Challenges

This paper identifies challenges and opportunities for enhancing higher education in entrepreneurship considering student perceptions concerning both their demand for entrepreneurship education and their entrepreneurial intention as well as previous studies that present the points of view of experts. The main focus is Brazilian higher education, but the results address challenges that cross borders, such as the need for a practical approach. The study analyzed the data from the Brazilian version of the 2011 Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey (GUESSS) obtained with an online questionnaire answered by 25,751 Brazilian students from 37 colleges and universities. To give a reference for a better understanding of Brazilian statistics, data were compared to those of the 2011 international GUESSS involving also 25 other countries and 64,079 responses from them. Three hypotheses were tested. The results show that entrepreneurship education has a significant negative effect on student entrepreneurial intention and also on self‐efficacy. The same occurs between entrepreneurial intention and students' demand for entrepreneurship education. Brazilian students present higher levels of entrepreneurial intention and are significantly more motivated to take courses and activities in entrepreneurship than those students in the international sample. Approximately 50 percent of Brazilian students are potential entrepreneurs. One of the opportunities identified is to take advantage of students' positive attitudes and their high demand. The opportunities could play an important role in overcoming the challenges recognized, among which are the need for a more practical approach and the need for larger and diversified educational offerings beyond business planning. The challenges make Neck and Greene's recommendations, presented in a 2011 issue of JSBM, particularly important for Brazil. The last three sections propose different explanations, suggestions for more research, and practical recommendations.     

Does Economic Growth Really Benefit the Poor? Income Distribution Dynamics and Pro-poor Growth in Indonesia

We explore the nexus between poverty, inequality, and economic growth in Indonesia between 2002 and 2012, using several pro-poor growth concepts and indices to determine whether growth in this period benefited the poor. Our regression-based decompositions of poverty into growth and redistribution components suggest that around 40% of inequality in total household expenditure in Indonesia was due to variations in expenditure by education characteristics that persisted after controlling for other factors. We find that economic growth in this period benefited households at the top of the expenditure distribution, and that a ‘trickle down’ effect saw the poor receive proportionately fewer benefits than the non-poor. If reducing poverty is one of the Indonesian government's principal objectives, then policies designed to spur growth must take into account the possible impacts of growth on inequality.     

Bayesian Unconditional Quantile Regression: An Analysis of Recent Expansions in Wage Structure and Earnings Inequality in the US 1992–2009

We develop Bayesian inference for an unconditional quantile regression model. Our approach provides better estimates in the upper tail of the wage distribution as well as valid small sample confidence intervals for the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition. We analyze the recent changes in the US wage structure using data from the CPS Outgoing Rotation Group from 1992 to 2009. We find that the largest part of the recent changes is explained mainly by differences in returns to education while the decline in the unionization rate has a small impact, and that earnings inequality is rising more at the top end of the wage distribution.     

Estimating the extensive margin of trade

Understanding and quantifying the determinants of the number of sectors or firms exporting in a given country is of relevance for the assessment of trade policies. Estimation of models for the number of exporting sectors, however, poses a challenge because the dependent variable has both a lower and an upper bound, implying that the partial effects of the explanatory variables on the conditional mean of the dependent variable cannot be constant. We argue that ignoring these bounds can lead to erroneous conclusions and propose a flexible specification that accounts for the doubly-bounded nature of the dependent variable. We empirically investigate the problem and the proposed solution, finding significant differences between estimates obtained with the proposed estimator and those obtained with standard approaches.     

Impacts of technology readiness on emotions and cognition in Brazil

This study proposes and tests an extended model for consumer adoption of high technology products in a Latin American country (Brazil) by integrating concepts present in the consumer behavior literature: the Consumer Acceptance of Technology model (Kulviwat et al., 2007) and the technology readiness construct (Parasuraman, 2000). The proposed model considers the relationships between cognitive and affective constructs with technology readiness. By means of structural equation modeling conducted on a sample of 435 young consumers, the results indicate significant relationships between the constructs assessed, showing that consumers' cognitive and affective evaluations of new technologies are significantly influenced by their technology readiness. The effects of technology readiness over affective assessments were greater than those relative to cognitive evaluations regarding high-tech innovations. Nonetheless, the results may reflect specific characteristics of Brazilian (and other Latin American) consumers, who are usually more emotive than those of more rational cultures.     

Entrepreneurial cognition and internationalization speed: towards a potential moderating effect of experiential and rational information processing

This study explores the influence that entrepreneurial cognition, in terms of the dichotomy in human information processing, has on the earliness of internationalization and post-entry speed. Entrepreneurial cognition is investigated through the lens of the dual-process theory, which posits that human information processing is formed of two systems, the experiential cognitive system (System 1) and the rational and analytical cognitive system (System 2). The speed of the entire internationalization process is analyzed in terms of earliness (how soon after inception a company enters its first international market) and post-entry speed (how fast it enters new markets after the first internationalization). Drawing on ten cases, we find that companies that internationalized earlier and faster were managed by entrepreneurs with higher levels of the experiential cognitive system. In contrast, companies that internationalized later and more gradually were managed by entrepreneurs with higher levels of the rational cognitive system. Thus, our study reveals that the speed of the entire process of internationalization is governed, at least partially, by the entrepreneur’s cognition. On the basis of our findings, we introduce three propositions on the moderation that the entrepreneur’s cognition exerts on the well-established relations between environmental signals and both earliness of internationalization and post-internationalization speed.

     

Output gap in Brazil: a real-time data analysis

Recent literature for developed economies has shown that output gap estimates go through important revisions over time, impairing their reliability in real time. We organize a real-time data set for Brazil’s GDP and assess the revisions of the output gap estimated by four different methods. Similar to the findings of studies for developed economies, the output gap revisions in Brazil are substantial in all methods, with frequent changes in the output gap sign. In general, both the GDP data revision and the effect of adding new observations to the sample are relevant sources of output gap revisions. However, differently from those studies, we cannot assert that the latter source is preponderant.     

The Breakdown of Idiosyncratic Volatility Into Expected and Unexpected Components and Its Effects on Stock Returns in Brazil

Based on studies of idiosyncratic volatility developed in the recent literature, this study analyzes its relation with expected returns through the breakdown of idiosyncratic volatility in the Brazilian stock market and presents evidence of the importance of expected idiosyncratic volatility for asset pricing. We study the impact of the expected and unexpected components of idiosyncratic volatility on the returns of shares listed on the BOVESPA between 2004 and 2011. The results show a strong positive and significant relation between expected idiosyncratic volatility and returns. This evidence is highlighted when we use unexpected idiosyncratic volatility to control for unexpected returns. Additional robustness tests, controlling for size and momentum effects, also have positive and significant coefficients, corroborating previous findings.     

How Do Investors Interpret Announcements of Earnings Delays?

Unlike in the case of delays of 10‐K or 10‐Q filings, the SEC does not require managers to disclose delays of earnings announcements to the public. Thus, for companies that are unable to report earnings by their expected date, managers face a decision: remain silent or announce the delay. Prior research has investigated all earnings delays, whether or not they are accompanied by announcements of the delay announcement, and found that the market reaction is slightly negative, on average, for companies that allow their expected earnings dates to pass without disclosing results. It's not clear, however, whether this negative reaction was due to the absence of news or to the information contained in the announcements of the earnings delays. The authors' recent study documents that earnings delay announcements are associated with an average one‐day abnormal stock return of a negative 6%. This statistically as well as economically significant reduction in value is consistent with anecdotal evidence in the popular business press as well as predictions of disclosure theories, in particular the explanation that concerns about legal liability and managerial reputation motivate managers to disclose bad news. The study also shows that almost all managers who announce earnings delays attempt to influence the market reaction by disclosing the underlying cause. Finally, the study shows that the market reaction to earnings delay announcements is positively related to future earnings changes, consistent with the role of these disclosures in providing a signal of deteriorating financial performance.     

Returns to education and wage equations

The paper shows why considering a number of education-dependent covariates in a wage equation decreases the coefficient of education in that equation. This result is illustrated empirically with a meta-analysis for Portugal. The education coefficient decreases when covariates are used that can be considered post-education decisions; on the other hand, it is independent of sample size, tenure and whether hourly or monthly wages are used. These results support the use of a simple specification of the Mincer equation for the study of the total returns to education.