This study analyses the situation of the Brazilian population vis-à-vis the Social Security System (SSS) using data from PNAD. We chose the 1982, 1992 and 2002 PNAD data to give a series of pictures of the Brazilian population at equal intervals but under different legal instances with respect...

Many believe that "big data" will transform business, government and other aspects of the economy. In this article we discuss how new data may impact economic policy and economic research. Large-scale administrative datasets and proprietary private sector data can greatly improve the way we...

Risk management has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past fifteen years, with most new methods having been designed for the concerns of large institutions operating in well-developed financial markets. This paper addresses a problem faced by smaller institutions operating in...

The expectations obtained from surveys play an important role as leading indicators for the application of the monetary policies. The ability to measure inflation expectations is an integral part of central bank policy especially for central banks that are implementing inflation-targeting...

Bayesian Confirmation Measures can be used in ranking inductive rules obtained as an output when using Association Rules in database mining. Many measures of this kind have been defined and the choice of the right one can be considered as a further challenge to be faced. In this paper we try to...

This paper presents the scoring and weighting methodology for calculation of the services trade restrictiveness indices (STRIs) for 18 sectors. The STRIs are composite indices taking values between zero and one, zero representing an open market and one a market completely closed to foreign...

The weekly returns of equities are commonly used in the empirical research to avoid the non-synchronicity of daily data. An empirical analysis is used to show that the statistical properties of a weekly stock returns series strongly depend on the method used to construct this series. Three types...

In this article we present a technique of data analysis applied to three-dimensional tables as, for instance, matrix-valued time-series. The main goal of the method is to describe the evolution of the statistical units with respect to time in a space summarizing the set of matrices. Moreover,...

In social and economic analysis of longitudinal data, the socio-economic variables that are statistically significant in pooled data regressions sometimes become insignificant after individual fixed effects are controlled for. This phenomenon has been observed in the analysis of the relationship...

We propose a straightforward approach to obtain a more efficient estimate of the integrated variance of an asset through a cross-sectional combination with a futures contract written on it. Our method constructs a variance-preserving series with reduced noise size as a linear combination of the...