REMITTANCES, POVERTY AND INEQUALITY

This paper explores the effect of remittances across the distribution of income. Based on a panel of 46 countries that covers the period between 1970 and 2000, we find that the effect of remittances is non-monotone across the distribution of income and strongest in low income countries. The impact of remittances is positive and decreasing in income for the bottom 70 percent of the population, and negative and increasing in income in the top 20 percent of the population. All else equal, remittances decrease inequality as their effect is mostly felt among the poor and they are negatively related to the income of the rich. We estimate that for low income countries a 1 percent increase in remittances would increase the first decile¡¯s income by approximately 0.43 percent, while the same change would increase the seventh decile¡¯s income by only 0.04 percent. In contrast, a 1 percent increase in remittances is associated with a 0.10 percent decrease in the income of the top 10 percent of the population.Remittances, Poverty, Inequality, Migration

On the Distributional Effects of Trade Policy: A Macroeconomic Perspective

This paper develops a theoretical model to explore the relationship between openness to trade and long-term income inequality. Empirical evidence on the issue is mixed, though greater inequality is often cited as a possible cost of trade liberalization. To quantify the effect of liberalization on inequality I calibrate a two-sector (agriculture and non-agriculture) open-economy macroeconomic model to the Mexican economy. Agents in the model are subject to idiosyncratic, uninsurable labor income risk, and precautionary saving generates endogenous distributions of wealth and income. When preferences are characterized by subsistence floor for food consumption, trade liberalization implies large welfare gains for low wealth agents. At the same time, liberalization increases long-run wealth and income inequality. After liberalization land-owners are worse off since the price of land falls along with the relative price of the agricultural commodity. When tariff revenue must be replaced by an alternative instrument, higher labor taxes are preferred to higher taxes on consumption or capitalFree trade; inequality; agriculture

Financial Frictions, Foreign Direct Investment, and Growth

This paper assesses the role of financial frictions and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on an economy´s growth rate, business cycle volatility, and firm´s capital structure. We gauge these effects within the Financial Accelerator framework, where entrepreneurs can establish affiliates of local firms abroad through Foreign Direct Investment. Model simulations suggest that in the presence of credit market imperfections FDI is associated with faster growth, less leverage, and lower aggregate volatility. These features are consistent with the macroeconomic dynamics of the more globally integrated economies over the last three decades.Output volatility, Foreign Direct Investment, International Diversification, Capital Structure

Ontological Stakeholder View: An Innovative Proposition

This article describes a theoretical way of understanding business enterprise, for what it is used the stakeholder theory as a theory of the firm. Thus, the purpose of this article is to show an innovative perspective called ontological perspective of stakeholders that relies on a phenomenological model where the subjective perspective of agents is the key, from a purely monetarist model to an economic, social and emotional value creation model, and from a deductive model of stakeholder interests to an inductive model. The main contributions are: add a new perspective to the different classifications made of stakeholder theory, avoid monetarist reductionism under the concept of value in a way that the manager takes into account all interconnected interests of stakeholders, and finally prioritize interests map instead of roles map without accepting the assumption that the role involves joint and no conflicting interests

First-year university students' algebraic thinking and its relationship to geometric conceptual understanding

This study investigated how first-year university students at Universidade Pedagógica (Pedagogical University) in Maputo-Mozambique brought their knowledge and thinking of algebra in understanding and working with geometry. The study explored how these students connected and used algebraic and geometric concepts and investigated whether this connection promoted students’ conceptual understanding and problem solving performance in geometry. The main body of the research was done in three phases, which were analysed separately. The three phases were the Pilot Study, the Main Study – Euclidean Geometry Course, and the Main Study – Analytic Geometry Course. Transcripts from the interviews with the target students, and the artefacts collected from the students (Pilot test, Diagnostic test, and written responses to the Elaboration and Concept Mapping Task) constituted the bulk of the data for this study. The data collection was carried out during two successive semesters. The constant comparative method and the grounded theory were used in the analysis of the data. A model was adapted from the literature (Charbonneau, 1996; Stillwell, 1998; and Duval, 1998) to explore how algebraic thinking might be an aid to geometrical understanding . It shows that the cognitive processes (symbolization, relations, and abstraction), which underlie algebraic thinking, are interconnected. These cognitive processes might jointly be used to aid any of the cognitive processes which constitute geometrical understanding (visualization processes, construction processes, and reasoning), either separately or jointly. Prawat’s (1989) framework on transfer and learning appeared to be relevant to analyse the data collected in the study: (Knowledge connectedness and communication, general and specific strategy, and mastery and performance disposition). The results showed that in Analytic Geometry the students needed intuition (synthetic strategies) to inform their reasoning (analytic strategies). In the contrary, in Euclidean Geometry they needed reasoning (analytic strategies) to inform their intuition (synthetic strategies). However, I observed that this balance still needed to take place in my target students’ mind. In other words, in Analytic Geometry, my students needed geometric thinking to aid their algebraic thinking and in Euclidean Geometry, they needed algebraic thinking to aid their geometric thinking. This mutuality in geometry seems to underpin what Schoenfeld (1986) found that the interaction of deductive (as a means of discovery) and empirical (as a means of development of intuition) approaches to geometry leads students to reap the benefits of their knowledge

Ethical banks: an Alternative in the Financial Crisis

This paper studies the differences between traditional financial intermediaries (commercial banks, saving banks and credit cooperatives) and ethical banks that focus on positive social and ethical values. The credit crisis calls into question the functionality and good performance of traditional banks. The full incorporation of ethical values and principles by traditional financial intermediaries might be a form to solve their misleading financial situation. We have analyzed four factors that theoretically mean ethical differences: information transparency, placement of assets, guarantees and participation. These four factors are grouped in an index called Radical Affinity Index (RAI). The paper is focused on the study of RAI using a sample of 119 European banks. The evidence shows, that transparency of information and placement of assets are factors that differentiate ethical banks and the rest of financial intermediaries. The guarantees and participation, which seemed to be useful factors to differentiate ethical aspects of banks, do not support clear evidence to the analysis. In sum, RAI is a functional and useful index to show the ethical policy of financial intermediaries

(Undamped) Modal Analysis of MDOF Systems

Free & Force Vibrations of undamped MDOF systems. Orthogonality properties of natural modes. Rayleigh energy methods. Mode superposition (displacement and acceleration methods

Robust Speech Detection for Noisy Environments

This paper presents a robust voice activity detector (VAD) based on hidden Markov models (HMM) to improve speech recognition systems in stationary and non-stationary noise environments: inside motor vehicles (like cars or planes) or inside buildings close to high traffic places (like in a control tower for air traffic control (ATC)). In these environments, there is a high stationary noise level caused by vehicle motors and additionally, there could be people speaking at certain distance from the main speaker producing non-stationary noise. The VAD presented in this paper is characterized by a new front-end and a noise level adaptation process that increases significantly the VAD robustness for different signal to noise ratios (SNRs). The feature vector used by the VAD includes the most relevant Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), normalized log energy and delta log energy. The proposed VAD has been evaluated and compared to other well-known VADs using three databases containing different noise conditions: speech in clean environments (SNRs mayor que 20 dB), speech recorded in stationary noise environments (inside or close to motor vehicles), and finally, speech in non stationary environments (including noise from bars, television and far-field speakers). In the three cases, the detection error obtained with the proposed VAD is the lowest for all SNRs compared to Acero¿s VAD (reference of this work) and other well-known VADs like AMR, AURORA or G729 annex b