Experimental evidence that quorum rules discourage turnout and promote election boycotts

Many democratic decision making institutions involve quorum rules. Such rules are commonly motivated by concerns about the “legitimacy” or “representativeness” of decisions reached when only a subset of eligible voters participates. A prominent example of this can be found in the context of direct democracy mechanisms, such as referenda and initiatives. We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the consequences of the two most common types of quorum rules: a participation quorum and an approval quorum. We find that both types of quora lead to lower participation rates, dramatically increasing the likelihood of full-fledged electoral boycotts on the part of those who endorse the Status Quo. This discouraging effect is significantly larger under a participation quorum than under an approval quorum.     

Directed technical change and environmental quality

Portuguese Economic Journal - We propose a directed technical change model with two sectors, clean and dirty, to analyze the impact of the degree of substitutability between sectors and the degree...     

Fear of Floating in Brazil: Did Inflation Targeting matter?

Brazil implemented Inflation Targeting (IT) after the breakdown of a managed floating regime, showing a similar pattern to most of the emerging markets that adopted this framework. This unplanned policy change has led to some disbelief regarding the country's commitment to its inflation objective and to a floating exchange rate. In this paper we analyse whether the adoption of IT has led to an actual shift in the country's approach to the exchange rate. We find greater exchange rate flexibility and milder interventions in the foreign exchange market after IT. We conclude that possible interventions should not be seen as Fear of Floating, but as a required policy for the attainment of the inflation targets.     

Nonlinear monetary policy reaction functions in large emerging economies: the case of Brazil and China

This article estimates monetary policy rules for two key emerging market economies: Brazil and China. It analyses whether the monetary authority reacts to changes in economic activity, financial markets, monetary conditions, the foreign exchange market and the commodity price. We assess the importance of nonlinearity using a smooth transition regression (STR) model. Using quarterly data over the time period 1990:1 to 2008:4, we find that considerations about the output gap and the real effective exchange rate (in the case of Brazil), and the inflation rate (for China) explain the nonlinear adjustment of the central bank rate. Moreover, the results suggest that central banks pursue a target range for the threshold variable rather than a specific point target. In the case of China, the McCallum rule shows that the GDP growth, the interest rate and the commodity price drive the response of the growth rate of the relevant monetary aggregate.     

Labour-market institutions, (un)employment,wages, and growth: theory and data

We analyse the implications of labour-market institutions on wage inequality in favour of skilled labour, on relative unemployment of unskilled labour, and on the economic growth rate in two clusters resulting from 27 OECD countries: Cluster 1, closely related with the Anglo-Saxon model, and Cluster 2, dominated by the Continental-European model. By linking the unskilled wage to the skilled one in Cluster 2, due to the indexation of social benefits to per-capita income, we accommodate the observed paths of the three variables in both clusters between 1991 and 2008: Cluster 1 presents a higher wage inequality in favour of skilled labour, a lower unemployment of the unskilled labour, and a better economic growth rate.     

New services margin/high success discriminators

The present range of services, particularly financial, is subject to high privatisation and competition. Anticipating the future return of new projects is a critical challenge that confronts marketing managers at present. However, the transfer of success models from new products to services has not allowed a global vision of the internal and external environment that best set up the success of new services. Using a sample of 120 new Portuguese financial services (67 successful/57 failures), this study examines the relationships foreseen by a global model of success determinants of new services, i.e., formulates and tests hypotheses relative to the differentiated impact of the strategic and environmental factors on the multiple return indicators. The results of a binary logistic regression analysis suggest that a group of factors that best discriminate between new services of average and high return, through its different indicators that distinguishes the factors, is slightly different and less than one that distinguishes between successful and failed innovations.     

Social Movements Beyond the Iron Cage: Weak Ties in Territorial Development

The incentives and governance system of organizations are important in explaining how they behave in localized development processes. This article builds on the observation that the literature on territorial development does not generally address the action of social movements. At the same time, research on social movements rarely studies their effects on the territories in which they act. This text is a contribution to fill this gap. It compares two social movement organizations: a trade union federation and a credit cooperative system operating throughout southern Brazil. Both organizations share common origins and social bases, yet their impacts on territories have been quite different. The analysis focuses on the social ties that link trade unions and cooperatives to their territories to show that governance systems may explain the performance of each organization, especially with regard to their capacity for innovation.     

Effect of the Tax System ON R&D Intensity,Growth, Wages and Consumption Share

We propose a general equilibrium knowledge‐driven (semi‐)endogenous‐growth model with horizontal R&D, which is extended to consider two types of labour, skilled and unskilled, and exogenous government expenditure, financed through taxes on financial assets and on labour income, to analyse the implications of the tax system on R&D intensity, economic growth, wage inequality and consumption share in the output. In particular, we show that: (i) taxes have negative influence in the consumption share, being higher the marginal effect of the labour‐income tax; (ii) for any given government expenditure share, an increase (a decrease) in financial‐assets tax decreases (increases) the labour‐income tax; (iii) only the financial‐assets tax affects negatively the R&D intensity and the skill‐premium; thus, to reduce the skill‐premium the financial‐assets tax must increase; (iv) ignoring the effect on wage inequality and on R&D intensity, taxes are substitutes.     

On ‘creative cities’ governance models: a comparative approach

The implementation of ‘creative cities’ projects all over the world in recent years has been characterised by a great diversity of institutional frameworks and governance mechanisms.

Departing from the contemporary debates on ‘creative industries’ and ‘creative cities’, this article aims to discuss this diversity of regulatory mechanisms and forms of governance. Some tentative typologies of case studies and governance mechanisms are drawn in order to improve the understanding of those dynamics, to build up knowledge on suitable ‘creative cities’ governance models, and to develop ideas to support a strategy for public intervention in the Portuguese case.