Micro-credit and micro-finance emerged in the 1970’s in some Asian and Latin American countries as an instrument for fighting poverty and social exclusion. Using 2006-9 portuguese micro-level data, we estimate the failure rate of Portuguese micro-credit projects as 18,4%/year. This failure...

Este livro é um guia de apoio a Microeconomia contendo dois pontos programáticos. No 1.º capítulo, apresento o mercado desagregado em três Leis da Natureza: i) que as pretensões dos vendedores se agregam na função de oferta; ii) que as pretensões dos compradores se agregam na função de...

Foi prometido que Portugal, ao pertencer à Zona Euro, iria convergir rapidamente com os restantes países da UE e que teria taxas de juro muito baixas. No entanto, uma década de descontrolo económico levaram o país para uma situação de taxas de juro proibitivamente elevadas o que tem um...

The rapid growth in the consumption of electricity in China and India has been covered at 80% by coal, which has the side effect of emitting CO2 to the atmosphere. The alternative is the use of nuclear energy that, to become unquestionably competitive, must use supercritical water as coolant....

One important issue in firms’ governance is how to create incentives so that activity centres can become more efficient. In this paper, we first introduce an agency contract where the salary of the manager of an activity centre that produces an intermediate product is dependent of its...

To overcome market failures society creates common laws that stimulate or penalize individual actions, the enforcement of which depends on the actions of public authorities who may be susceptible to corruption. Thus, a new market emerges where ‘influences’ are traded. Legislators have...

Although it is an empirical regularity that in the trade of homogeneous goods there is persistent price dispersion and buyers search for low-priced items, theoretically we find that in market equilibrium, when buyers are optimisers (the neo-classical framework), these regularities do not occur....

In this paper I investigate whether, in market equilibrium, one observes price dispersion and search when buyers intend to acquire several products whose price is unknown and exists a positive search cost. Although that seems fruitful, I prove that in market equilibrium it is not observed...

Although it is known that there are circumstances where the competitive situation does not promote social welfare maximization, collusion is usually associated with firms’ strategies that decrease welfare. In this paper, using the theoretical framework of the industrial organization, I...

On a regular basis the scientific output of academic people has to be evaluated, e.g. to decide tenure. A very important item in this evaluation is the published papers’ quality that tends to be approximated by its impact in the literature. As the measure of this impact requires a long-term...