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Road networks have significant impacts on ecosystems through deforestation, rapid land conversion and wildlife-vehicle collisions. Road ecology seeks to analyze the spatial and biological patterns of collisions to understand the effect of roadways and best inform transportation planning in mitigating these threats. 215 km of roadway BR-262, that bisects critical habitat of the Brazilian Cerrado and Pantanal in southwest Brazil, was analyzed between April 2011 and June 2012 to assess how biological, physical and landscape characteristics affect clustering of collisions. 518 collisions, representing 40 species, were found to be seasonally clustered between the unimodal rain and flood pulse in a February-March-April window and were spatially clustered over the study area in relation to cash crop and cattle ranching land-use and the rural low-lying Pantanal floodplain. Mitigation seeks to work with local communities and transportation agencies to facilitate fauna safe crossing through the roadway that do not conflict with drivers. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis advisor: Corinne I. Wong / The South American Monsoon System is the dominant convective system over tropical South America during austral summer that is critical to a region heavily dependent on agricultural and hydroelectric production. An understanding of the controls on moisture conditions throughout Brazil is critical to assessing recurrent droughts and global climate change responses. An increasing number of monsoon reconstructions from δ¹⁸O records provide insight into last millennium variation of regional monsoon intensity. However, the relationship between past variations in monsoon intensity and local moisture conditions has yet to be investigated. In this study, we develop speleothem ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values as a paleo-moisture proxy from a cave site located in central Brazil. Increasing speleothem ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values and decreasing δ²³⁴U values over the last millennium indicate progressively wetter conditions. A similar trend in monsoon intensity is not evident in δ¹⁸O records from the region, suggesting that monsoon intensity is decoupled from the local moisture conditions through the late Holocene. The potential decoupling between the monsoon and local moisture conditions suggests that processes independent from those governing monsoon intensity may play a critical role in dictating moisture variability in the region. / Thesis (MS) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Thesis advisor: Vladimir Bandera / The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the balance-of-payments problems of a particular debtor country by focusing on the effects of rapid external debt accumulation and of expanding debt servicing obligations on external balance. Brazil from 1948 to 1963 Is a logical choice for a study of this type since severe debt servicing problems were experienced throughout this period, particularly between 1955 and 1963. The Intention is not to portray Brazil as a typical debtor country since its problems were more intense and more immediate than related problems in most other debtor countries in the process of development. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 1967. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

O setor supermercadista no Brasil passou por profundas transformações na década de 1990 tais como o processo de consolidação das maiores empresas, automação comercial e uso de transferência eletrônica de informações. O objetivo do estudo foi analisar o impacto das modificações deste setor sobre a economia utilizando a teoria insumo-produto. Para tanto, o novo setor Supermercados foi desagregado do setor Comércio na matriz de insumo-produto do Brasil para os anos de 1990, 1995 e 1999 e os indicadores econômicos referentes à geração de emprego, renda, produção e impostos e índices de ligações intersetoriais foram calculados para todos os setores da economia. Para os anos de 1995 e 1999 também foi aplicada uma nova metodologia para análise setorial do varejo, a qual consiste em incorporar os valores a preços básicos das mercadorias comercializadas como custos operacionais do setor supermercadista. Além disso, foi estimado o produto interno bruto setorial do novo setor Supermercados para os anos indicados anteriormente. As principais conclusões da pesquisa são de que o setor Supermercados apresenta grande importância na geração de emprego, renda, produção e imposto sobre circulação de mercadorias e serviços (ICMS) para o período 1990-1999 e o PIB setorial é de aproximadamente 5% do produto interno bruto nacional. Para o ano de 1999, valores obtidos pela nova proposta metodológica, os supermercados eram capazes de gerar 154 empregos totais, cerca de R$ 400 mil em salários e R$ 110 mil em impostos (ICMS) para uma variação da demanda final de um milhão de reais. O maior impacto da variação da produção dos supermercados em termos de geração de emprego, renda e produção ocorre sobre os setores Agropecuária, Outros produtos alimentares, Beneficiamento de produtos vegetais, Indústria de laticínios, Comércio, Serviços prestados às famílias e Aluguel de imóveis. O impacto sobre a Agropecuária e indústria de alimentos ocorre principalmente por efeito indireto e sobre os setores de serviços por efeito induzido. Outras indústrias passam a indicar maior influência das vendas dos supermercados sobre sua produção, emprego e renda, principalmente Artigos plásticos, Artigos do vestuário e Serviços prestados às empresas. Isto indica a diversificação dos produtos comercializados pelos supermercados com itens não-alimentos, principalmente com a abertura de hipermercados, e maiores gastos com propaganda e outros serviços prestados às empresas. / The Supermarket sector in Brazil went through deep transformations in the decade of 1990, such as: a) the process of consolidation of the largest companies; b) commercial automation; and c) use of electronic transfer of information. The objective of the study is to analyze the impact of the modifications occurred in this sector on the economy, using the input-output theory. To do so, the new Supermarkets sector were extracted from the Trade sector of the input-output matrix of Brazil for the years 1990, 1995 and 1999 and the economic indicators referring to the employment, income, production, taxes, and inter-sector linkages were calculated for all the sectors of the economy. For the years 1995 and 1999 a new methodology was also applied for sectorial analysis of the supermarket sector, which consists of incorporating the values, at basic prices, of the goods traded as operational costs in the Supermarket sector. Besides, the sectorial gross domestic product (GDP) of the new Supermarket sector was estimated for the years indicated previously. The main conclusions of the research are that the Supermarket sector is an important one in generating employment, income, production and sales taxes (ICMS) for the period 1990-1999. The GDP of the Supermarket complex is of approximately 5% of the national GDP. For the year of 1999, values obtained using the new methodology show that the supermarkets were capable to generate, for a variation of R$ 1 million of the final demand: a) 154 new jobs; b) R$ 400 thousand in wages; and c) R$ 110 thousand in taxes (ICMS). The largest impact of the variation of the supermarkets production in terms of employment generating, income and production occurs on the following sectors: a) Agricultural; b) Other Food Products; c) Processing of Vegetable Products; d) Dairy Industry; e) Trade; f) Services Rendered to Families; and g) Rents. The impact on the Agricultural and Food industry happens mainly by indirect effect and on the sectors of services by induced effect. Other industries started to indicate a larger influence of the sales of the supermarkets on its production, employment and income, mainly in Plastic Goods, Clothing and Services Rendered to the Companies. This indicates: a) the diversification of the products marketed by the supermarkets, mainly non-food items, related with the opening of hypermarkets; and b) larger expenses with marketing and other services rendered to the companies.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Boston University

This thesis investigates the magnitude and evolution of gender and racial occupational segregation and wage gaps in Brazil from 1987 to 2006. First, we provide the construction of a new harmonized and temporally consistent re-classification of the occupational codes using the Brazilian household survey, the PNADs. This new occupational classification permits an examination of the evolution of the Brazilian occupational structure over a protracted period of time. Second, we examine the occupational structure in Brazil assessing both the extent and trends in gender and racial based occupational segregation. We use several wellknown indices of segregation (Duncan and Duncan, 1955; Moir and Selby-Smith, 1979; Karmel and Maclachlan, 1988; Silber, 1989) and focus on the evolution over time of the occupational segregation across formal and non-formal labour markets. An attempt is made to assess the main forces driving changes in occupational segregation over time by employing a decomposition of the segregation measures developed by Deutsch, Flueckiger and Silber (2009). Third, we investigate the magnitude and evolution of gender and racial pay gaps in Brazil by employing several decomposition techniques. Together with the standard Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, we apply the Brown, Moon and Zoloth (1980) decomposition technique, which allows us to account for the impact of occupational segregation on the wage gap. We explore the impact of the selection process on our decomposition results by employing different parametric corrections (the Heckman (1979) and Lee (1983) corrections). Several sensitivity checks are also implemented and alternative correction methods investigated such as the non-parametric imputation method by Olivetti and Petrongolo (2008) and the local wage gap estimation by Machado (2011). Fourth, we attempt to provide a comprehensive portrait of gender and racial wage gaps across the entire wage distribution while exploring the impact of gender and racial occupational segregation on wage determination in the Brazilian labour market. Our analysis particularly focuses on the evolution of the impact of female and non-white occupational intensity on wage outcomes and disparities. We employ quantile regression analysis in order to investigate the role of female and non-white occupational intensity at different points along the conditional wage distribution. We then apply two different decomposition techniques, proposed by Machado and Mata (2005) and Melly (2006), and by Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (2009), to investigate the determinants of wage disparities at these different points in the wage distribution and to understand how these determinants vary across the wage distribution. Finally, we offer some concluding remarks, discuss the limitation of the research and provide an agenda for future research on the themes investigated in this thesis.