Threatening to increase productivity

The wave of privatization in the 1980s and 1990s increased productivity of many previously state owned enterprises (SOEs). However, governments often do not have su±cient support to privatize SOEs. We provide evidence that threatening privatization and market competition (entry of new firms) can increase the productivity of SOEs, even though privatization and entry of new ¯rms does not occur. We study productivity at Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras. After it lost its legal monopoly Petrobras's total factor productivity increased sharply. These large gains occurred despite the fact that Petrobras faced no immediate de facto competition. The threat of competition and privatization was su±cient to generate large productivity gains. These findings suggest that changing the competitive environment can be a powerful force for improving productivity at state-owned firms.Productivity; Competition; Oil Industry

Sustainable Miracles

Growth Miracles, Total Factor Productivity, Brazil

The role of intelligent systems in financial auditing and financial fraud

Intelligent systems have become increasingly prominent in the current competitive and changing corporate atmosphere. Although people in firms still handle many jobs, intelligent systems will become more prominent in the short/medium future and will execute everyday jobs presently executed by people considerably more effectively. Businesses must adapt and consider how human and intelligent systems skills might be combined. This study focuses on the financial auditing profession since these individuals devote a lot of time doing repetitive tasks that intelligent technologies can straightforwardly and swiftly execute. This study investigates the influence of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and the Internet of Things on this profession. As per the survey, financial auditors understand that intelligent systems are the way to go as a tool to help them perform their jobs, but they are still concerned to change. Employing these systems in daily financial auditing tasks is seen as having a lot of benefits by these professionals and intelligent systems professionals, but there are still some barriers to overcome. Regardless of the circumstances, intelligent systems will significantly influence financial audits

Linguistic and non-linguistic cues to acquiring the strong distributivity of each

The universal quantifier each is more strongly distributive than its counterparts every and all. It forces predicates to apply to individuals, it more often supports pair-list readings, it’s unfriendly to genericity, and, in psycholinguistic tasks, it encourages encoding and remembering individual properties. But what information leads learners to acquire this aspect of em>each’s meaning? We explore the hypothesis that, because of its meaning, parents are more likely to use each in situations that independently promote representing the domain of quantification as a series of individuals (as opposed to a group). In line with this, we find that in child-directed speech, parents often use each to quantify over small numbers of physically present things. The same cannot be said of every and all. Because such situations are independently known to trigger object-files – the mind’s system for representing individuals – we argue that these cases are ideal for acquiring the individualistic aspect of each

«Crise da conjuntura» ou crise do capitalismo?

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Teoria do conhecimento

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