O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar possíveis desigualdades sócio-econômicas na saúde no Estado de São Paulo e no Município de Ribeirão Preto. Os dados utilizados para São Paulo são provenientes da Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD) de 2003, realizada pelo Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), e que apresenta características dos indivíduos e do domicílio. A base para Ribeirão Preto consiste em uma coorte desenvolvida pelo departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria de Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto da USP no período de junho de 1978 a maio de 1979. Analisou-se a distribuição das variáveis relativas à saúde (doenças crônicas e auto-avaliação) entre quintis de renda. Adicionalmente, foram calculados Índices de Concentração de Saúde, cuja construção é semelhante a do Índice de Gini. Esse índice considera a proporção acumulada de determinada doença e a proporção acumulada da população, ordenada de forma crescente de acordo com a renda. Foram estimados também os impactos de algumas variáveis explicativas sobre a probabilidade de apresentar determinada doença ou de se auto-avaliar de determinada forma. Para o Estado de São Paulo consideraram-se como variáveis explicativas: escolaridade, sexo, cor e idade (todas variáveis dummy). Para Ribeirão Preto foram consideradas como variáveis explicativas: escolaridade, o fato de um dos pais apresentar a doença em questão, o fato de um dos pais apresentar alguma outra doença crônica, sexo e cor (todas variáveis dummy). O método de estimação utilizado para analisar o impacto sobre a probabilidade de apresentar dada doença foi o Probit. Já para auto-avaliação foi utilizado o Probit Ordenado. Os resultados para o Estado de São Paulo demonstraram, em sua maioria, desigualdade na saúde em favor dos ricos. Além disso, em geral, quanto maior a escolaridade menor a probabilidade de apresentar determinada doença. Em relação a Ribeirão Preto, os resultados não foram totalmente conclusivos, uma vez a quarta etapa da coorte apresentou indivíduos de 22 a 26 anos, cuja faixa etária apresenta pequena incidência de doenças crônicas. Todavia, notou-se que a saúde dos pais influencia na saúde dos filhos, tanto por meio de características transmitidas, quanto devido ao fato de que pais com saúde ruim não devem poder ter muitos gastos com a saúde dos filhos. / The aim of this work was to evaluated eventual socio-economic health inequalities in State of São Paulo and Municipal District of Ribeirão Preto. The data related to São Paulo were obtained from the National Survey by Households Sampling (PNAD) of 2003, elaborated by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which presents individual and household characteristics. The Ribeirão Preto database consists in a cohort developed by the Pediatrics and Puericulture Department of the Ribeirão Preto Medical School-USP in the period between June of 1978 and May of 1979. It was analyzed the distribution of the health variables (chronicle diseases and self-assessment) between quintiles of income. In addition, it were calculated Health Concentration Indexes, whose construction is similar to the Gini Indexes. This index considers the accumulated proportion of certain disease and the accumulated proportion of the population, ordered according to the income. It was also estimated the impacts of some explanatory variables on the probability of presenting certain disease or self-assessing in certain way. For the State of São Paulo it was considered as explanatory variables: education, gender, race and age (all dummy variables). For the Municipal District of Ribeirão Preto it was considered as explanatory variables: education, the fact that one of the parents has the disease, the fact that one of the parents has another chronicle disease, gender and race (all dummy variables). It was employed the Probit method to analyze the impact on the probability of presenting certain illness. For the self-assessment variable, the Ordered Probit method was employed. Generally, the results for the State of São Paulo showed inequality in benefit of the richest. Besides, in general, the higher the education the lower is the probability of having certain disease. In the case of Ribeirão Preto, the results weren?t totally conclusive, since the fourth stage of the cohort presented individuals between 22 and 26 years old, whose age class show little incidence of chronicle diseases. Nevertheless, one can note that the health of the parents influences the health of their sons. As for the fact that certain characteristics are passed on, as for the fact that ill parents should not have large expenses with the health of their sons.

Procurement centralization is a process that includes policy decisions on the appropriate level of collaboration, aggregation and standardization. We analyse the main aspects of collaborative procurement: centralization, scope and different market structures. We use a unique dataset that combines Czech tender-level data with the manually-collected data on centrally procured tenders and financial firm-level data for the time span 2008 - 2016. We apply vector generalized linear model to the compulsory centralized procurement sectors and assess the market competition and concentration. We find several key aspects of centralized procurement: the centralization has a significant positive impact on the competition in selected sectors. The framework agreement is recognized as a positive setup of public procurement. We identified a strong negative evidence of the heterogeneity of the procured commodity. The design of centralization process and the degree of centralization is always bound by two elementary questions: the flexibility or unification trade-off and the set-up costs or unit costs trade-off. JEL Classification D44, H11, H57 Keywords public procurement, centralization, tender- level data, firm-level data, market structure, concentration index, vector generalized linear model, Herfindahl-Hirschman...

O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar possíveis desigualdades sócio-econômicas na saúde no Estado de São Paulo e no Município de Ribeirão Preto. Os dados utilizados para São Paulo são provenientes da Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD) de 2003, realizada pelo Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), e que apresenta características dos indivíduos e do domicílio. A base para Ribeirão Preto consiste em uma coorte desenvolvida pelo departamento de Puericultura e Pediatria de Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto da USP no período de junho de 1978 a maio de 1979. Analisou-se a distribuição das variáveis relativas à saúde (doenças crônicas e auto-avaliação) entre quintis de renda. Adicionalmente, foram calculados Índices de Concentração de Saúde, cuja construção é semelhante a do Índice de Gini. Esse índice considera a proporção acumulada de determinada doença e a proporção acumulada da população, ordenada de forma crescente de acordo com a renda. Foram estimados também os impactos de algumas variáveis explicativas sobre a probabilidade de apresentar determinada doença ou de se auto-avaliar de determinada forma. Para o Estado de São Paulo consideraram-se como variáveis explicativas: escolaridade, sexo, cor e idade (todas variáveis dummy). Para Ribeirão Preto foram consideradas como variáveis explicativas: escolaridade, o fato de um dos pais apresentar a doença em questão, o fato de um dos pais apresentar alguma outra doença crônica, sexo e cor (todas variáveis dummy). O método de estimação utilizado para analisar o impacto sobre a probabilidade de apresentar dada doença foi o Probit. Já para auto-avaliação foi utilizado o Probit Ordenado. Os resultados para o Estado de São Paulo demonstraram, em sua maioria, desigualdade na saúde em favor dos ricos. Além disso, em geral, quanto maior a escolaridade menor a probabilidade de apresentar determinada doença. Em relação a Ribeirão Preto, os resultados não foram totalmente conclusivos, uma vez a quarta etapa da coorte apresentou indivíduos de 22 a 26 anos, cuja faixa etária apresenta pequena incidência de doenças crônicas. Todavia, notou-se que a saúde dos pais influencia na saúde dos filhos, tanto por meio de características transmitidas, quanto devido ao fato de que pais com saúde ruim não devem poder ter muitos gastos com a saúde dos filhos. / The aim of this work was to evaluated eventual socio-economic health inequalities in State of São Paulo and Municipal District of Ribeirão Preto. The data related to São Paulo were obtained from the National Survey by Households Sampling (PNAD) of 2003, elaborated by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which presents individual and household characteristics. The Ribeirão Preto database consists in a cohort developed by the Pediatrics and Puericulture Department of the Ribeirão Preto Medical School-USP in the period between June of 1978 and May of 1979. It was analyzed the distribution of the health variables (chronicle diseases and self-assessment) between quintiles of income. In addition, it were calculated Health Concentration Indexes, whose construction is similar to the Gini Indexes. This index considers the accumulated proportion of certain disease and the accumulated proportion of the population, ordered according to the income. It was also estimated the impacts of some explanatory variables on the probability of presenting certain disease or self-assessing in certain way. For the State of São Paulo it was considered as explanatory variables: education, gender, race and age (all dummy variables). For the Municipal District of Ribeirão Preto it was considered as explanatory variables: education, the fact that one of the parents has the disease, the fact that one of the parents has another chronicle disease, gender and race (all dummy variables). It was employed the Probit method to analyze the impact on the probability of presenting certain illness. For the self-assessment variable, the Ordered Probit method was employed. Generally, the results for the State of São Paulo showed inequality in benefit of the richest. Besides, in general, the higher the education the lower is the probability of having certain disease. In the case of Ribeirão Preto, the results weren?t totally conclusive, since the fourth stage of the cohort presented individuals between 22 and 26 years old, whose age class show little incidence of chronicle diseases. Nevertheless, one can note that the health of the parents influences the health of their sons. As for the fact that certain characteristics are passed on, as for the fact that ill parents should not have large expenses with the health of their sons.

Chapter 1: The Impact of Culture on the Second-Generation Immigrants’ Level of Trust in Canada Trust is one of the main elements of social capital; it determines the extent to which an individual cooperates with others. In this chapter, I assess whether cultural factors influence the level of trust in the population of second-generation immigrants in Canada. This paper is related to two strands of empirical literature. The first analyses the determinants of trust and the second studies the cultural transmission of values, attitudes and beliefs. I follow closely the literature on the cultural transmission and use an epidemiological approach to assess whether trust of second-generation immigrants is affected by their cultural heritage. This approach consists of comparing information about the outcomes of second-generation immigrants with that of the country of origin of their ancestry. We apply this approach using the Ethnic Diversity Survey (EDS), the World Value Survey (WVS) and the European Value Survey (EVS). Estimation results show that the average level of trust in the countries of origin of the ancestors of the second-generation immigrants has a strong significant impact on their level of trust. Thus, individual whose country of ancestry displays a high level of trust, tend to have a high level of trust. This provides evidence that individuals’ level of trust is not only explained by their personal experiences, characteristics, and the environment in which they live; but also by the culture in their country of ancestry. This means that culture does matter! I find that the results remain robust even if certain key countries are omitted or a different data set is used. Chapter 2: Decomposing Health Achievement and Socioeconomic Health Inequalities in Presence of Multiple Categorical Information This chapter presents a decomposition of the health achievement and the socioeconomic health inequality indices by multiple categorical variables and by regions. I adopt Makdissi and Yazbeck's (2014) counting approach to deal with the ordinal nature of the data of the United States National Health Interview Survey 2010. The findings suggest that the attributes that contribute the most to the deviation from perfect health in the United States are: anxiety, depression and exhaustion. Also, I find that the attributes that contribute the most to the total socioeconomic health inequality are ambulation, depression and pain. The regional decomposition results suggest that, if the aversion to socioeconomic health inequality is high enough, socioeconomic health inequalities between regions are the main contributors to the total socioeconomic health inequality in the United States. Chapter 3: Accounting for Freedom and Economic Resources in the Assessment of Changes in Women Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa This chapter assesses the importance of freedom in women’s wellbeing in twelve Sub-Saharan Africa countries by using data from Demographic Health Surveys. This paper presents a poverty comparison by using the stochastic dominance approach and relies on the economic resources and freedom as the two aspects of wellbeing which evokes the multidimensionality of poverty. This study is related to the following three pieces of literature: the sequential stochastic dominance, the multidimensional poverty, the Sen’s capability approach which is based on freedom. This paper is built on Makdissi et al. (2014) but differs from it in a number of respects. First, it focuses on poverty instead of welfare. Secondly, it applies the Shapley decomposition to determine the contributions of the economic resource distribution and the incidence of the threat of domestic violence to poverty changes over time. Consistent with previous work on the importance of freedom, I find that more freedom, i.e. less threat of domestic violence, affects women’s wellbeing positively since it decreases women’s poverty. The results indicate that women’s wellbeing has improved in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Senegal, and Zimbabwe and deteriorated in Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania.