Orientador: Maria Aparecida Chaves Jardim / Banca: Ana Lúcia de Castro / Banca: Luciana Ferreira da Silva / Resumo: A pesquisa em questão apresenta como objeto a propalada crise da instituição escolar, em um contexto no qual suas políticas e estratégias de ação parecem ser impotentes para conter as problemáticas sociais que se acentuam. As escolas públicas possuem dificuldades de se relacionar com a complexidade apresentada de atores sociais, em um corpo societário que cada vez mais se transforma. Esse estudo auxiliará em debates acerca da Sociologia da Educação e da Sociologia Econômica, contribuindo para repensar, no âmbito escolar, a questão da crença e da moral vigente na escola pública contemporânea, isto é, o enfraquecimento da crença/moral cultural em detrimento da moral econômica. Por meio de um estudo analítico, o intuito é demonstrar que a categoria moral/crença - educação para a cultura - cede espaço à categoria econômica - educação para o mercado. Assim, busca-se desconstruir um diálogo sobre educação que se apresenta óbvio e legitimador de diferenças sociais, apresentando o papel do Estado, da escola, da família e da imprensa na crise do sistema escolar público, retirando dos professores e dos alunos a culpa pelo dito fracasso escolar / Abstract: The research in question has as its object the purported crisis of the school, in a context in which their policies and strategies seem to be powerless to contain the social problems that stand out. The public schools have difficulties to deal with the complexity of social actors presented in a body corporate that is increasingly fragmented. This study will help in discussions about Sociology of Education and Economic Sociology, by contributing to rethink, in the school environment, the issue of belief and moral in the contemporary public school, in other words, the weakening of cultural belief / moral in detriment of the economic moral. Through an analytical study, the intention is to demonstrate that the category belief / moral - education for culture - gives way to the economic category - education for the market. Such case attempts to deconstruct a dialogue about education that has obvious and legitimating social differences, with the role of the state, school, family and the media in crisis in the school system, by removing from teachers and students the blame for school failure / Mestre

This dissertation covers both policy-oriented and theory-based topics in International Economics. The first two chapters cover financial policy related to the capital account, while the third chapter covers tariff policy related to the current account. The first chapter examines the theoretical value of capital controls in reducing the probability of bank runs. I develop a global game model with information-based bank runs and strategic complementarities within and between foreign and domestic creditors. My analysis appears to be the first to model the interconnectedness of foreign and domestic creditor behavior. The framework pins down the probability of a bank run and shows that a capital control can lower the probability of a domestic bank run and of capital flight. I also find that a control on outflows is relatively more effective than a control on inflows. Finally, I test the model's implications using the abnormal returns of Brazilian and South Korean bank stock prices as a proxy for the probability of bank runs. The second chapter analyzes the policy actions of Brazil and Chile between 2009 and the third quarter of 2011, when Brazil deployed capital account regulations and Chile intervened in its currency markets. I examine the effectiveness of each of these actions and the extent to which the actions of Brazil caused capital flow spillovers in the Chilean market. Consistent with the peer-reviewed literature on the subject, I find that capital account regulations had small but significant effects on the shifting the composition of capital inflows toward longer-term investment, on the level and volatility of the exchange rate, on asset prices, and on the ability of Brazil to have independence in monetary policy. Brazil's regulations did also temporarily cause an increase in capital flows into Chile. Chile's interventions did not have a lasting impact on the Chilean exchange rate or on asset prices beyond the initial announcements of the policies. In Brazil's case we thus conclude that Brazil's regulations helped the nation 'lean against the wind,' but were not enough to tame the 'tsunami' of post-crisis capital flows. The third chapter uses a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model calibrated to late nineteenth century parameters to show that protectionism alleviated the skilled wage gap. Had the U.S. chosen free trade instead of protective tariffs, wage inequality generally would have been higher in the post-bellum era. The imposition of high tariffs after the Civil War may have dampened what some economic historians believe to have been a long-term upward trend in inequality--the rising portion of the American-Kuznets' curve.

Made available in DSpace on 2010-04-20T20:57:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 1_87359.pdf: 1325469 bytes, checksum: 22f82618a3f0d84fc49202bc4cf328ba (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-05-12T00:00:00Z / Some authors argue in favor of a real exchange rate targeting strategy for developing countries in what could be called a development approach to exchange rates. By stimulating the export sector, a relatively undervalued currency may help to avert financial crises and put the economy in a more sustained developmental path. Exchange rate management may also have strong impacts on capital accumulation as it determines paths of consumption, savings and investment via real wage determination. An overvalued currency could cause savings displacement. Exchange rate policy is also important to avoid Dutch Disease and promote the development of a non traditional tradeable sector, which is usually very dynamic and contributes to innovations and productivity increases. Numerous studies have argued that most balance of payments crises are related to overvalued or misaligned currencies. Following this so-called development approach, the objective of the work is to study the impacts of real exchange rate levels on development. The main hypothesis to be analyzed is that a competitive currency contributes to per capita income growth. Overvalued currencies would be an important obstacle to development whereas undervalued currencies would stimulate it. / Alguns autores têm chamado a atenção para a importância da administração cambial nos processos de desenvolvimento econômico no que vem sendo conhecido como um ¿development approach¿ para taxas de câmbio. O nível do câmbio real teria forte impacto na acumulação de capital na medida em que afetaria as trajetórias de consumo, investimento e poupança agregados de uma economia via definição do nível do salário real. O setor de bens comercializáveis não tradicional estimulado por um câmbio competitivo destacar-se-ia pelo seu dinamismo e potencial de inovações tecnológicas, contribuindo para aumentos de produtividade necessários ao processo de desenvolvimento econômico. Estímulos ao setor de exportações contribuiriam também para a redução da vulnerabilidade a crises externas. Inúmeros estudos têm destacado a ocorrência de crises no balanço de pagamentos por problemas de sobrevalorização cambial ou desalinhamento. Com o objetivo de contribuir para essa discussão, o trabalho a ser apresentado trata das relações existentes entre nível do câmbio real e o processo de desenvolvimento econômico. Tem como objetivo mais específico analisar a hipótese de que haveria uma relação negativa entre nível do câmbio real e taxas de crescimento per capita. Câmbios reais relativamente desvalorizados seriam benéficos para processos de desenvolvimento econômico enquanto que níveis excessivos de apreciação cambial seriam nocivos.

In the following papers I propose to construct economic models that incorporate the disastrous effect of conflict. I model conflict theoretically in a Solow growth model and empirically in a GDP per worker growth model, in a civil war onset model and a model for civil war’s severity. The first chapter theoretically and empirically analyzes economic growth with conflict in the context of the Mankiw et al. (1992) adaptation of the Solow growth model and the natural resource growth model by Sachs and Warner (1995). I incorporate a variable of capital destruction in the physical and human capital accumulation equations and derive coherent theoretical and empirical results. The second chapter considers the onset of civil war across all countries and specific subsamples of countries from 1970 to 2007. The onset of war is modeled using economic and financial variables in addition to grievance variables from the political science literature to ascertain the extent to which financial crises and hyperinflation can bring about civil war. I estimate using panel time-series logistic regression techniques and discover the risk of conflict in Africa, Asia, highly-indebted poor countries, and low income countries. Some civil wars are fought for government control and others are fought over local issues - both types of war are controlled for with their own determinants. The third chapter determines factors that significantly affect the severity of civil wars from year to year. I employ the same IV/GMM estimation techniques from Chapter 1 to discover the role of financial crises, hyperinflation, unemployment, and development assistance and aid in the severity of war.

The thesis presents three papers in macroeconomics and monetary economics with an emphasis on financial instability and crises. The first paper, entitled "Interbank Market Crises and Financial Openness," studies the effect of financial openness on financial stability by extending a closed-economy DSGE model (Boissay, Collard and Smets, 2015) to an open economy in which banks are allowed to invest abroad. Financial internationalisation in the form of outward banking flows alters the behaviour of the economy in the run up to a typical interbank crisis, reducing the role played by domestic credit build ups. Prior to an interbank crisis, the level of assets typically builds up in an economy without access to international investment opportunities. In contrast, financial openness attenuates the build up of assets during productivity booms, which reduces the likelihood of financial overheating resulting in a banking crisis once productivity reverts to trend. Simulations of the model show that the open economy would generally experience fewer banking crises in the long run compared to an economy blocked from investing abroad. This finding may not obtain in the short run, however, should the economy be subject to large negative productivity shocks consequent upon a financial opening up to the external domain. The second paper, entitled "Unconventional Monetary Policy and Asset Allocation of International Mutual Funds," a joint work with Gino Cenedese and Menno Middeldorp (both at the Bank of England), analyses the spillovers of unconventional monetary policy from the US to the Rest of the World. Using panel regressions on a fund-level data-set of globally domiciled mutual funds, the study examines the degree to which the operations and surprises of US unconventional monetary policy prompt mutual fund managers to change their portfolio country weightings. Our study permits an analysis of the portfolio choice of mutual fund managers, as differentiated from the portfolio rebalancing behaviour of their underlying investors. It allows for a quantitative examination as to whether and to what extent fund managers undo or exacerbate the allocation decisions by their respective underlying investors. Unconventional monetary policy by the US Federal Reserve is found to induce fund managers to reduce their portfolio exposure to the US whilst increasing it to other countries in the Rest of the World. Specifically, the Fed's purchases of Treasury securities trigger portfolio rebalancing in equity funds, while its acquisition of mortgage backed securities and agency debt has a minimal effect on equity and bond fund portfolio allocations. Fed policy surprises do affect the portfolio allocations of equity funds. The main results continue to hold in a number of robustness checks. An extension of the study examines portfolio rebalancing effects of policy surprises by three other major monetary authorities, the ECB, BoJ and BoE. The main focus of the paper, however, is on the broader effects of US unconventional monetary policy on the asset allocation of international mutual funds. The third paper, entitled "Sovereign Debt Negotiations as a Macroeconomic Game with Strategic Interactions among Players," aims to show that existing methods analysing games with more than two players can be usefully applied to macroeconomic games involving strategic interactions among three or more players. This is shown in the context of sovereign refinancing negotiations which are modelled as a bargaining game between three players: a debtor country in need of finance (player 1); its creditors from the international official-sector (player 2); and its foreign private-sector creditors in the form of international banks (player 3). The presence of a third player has important effects on the distribution of the gains from trade and the stability of the game if one allows for the possibility that any two players may form a coalition against another player. After deriving these general results, the model is applied to the Greek sovereign debt crisis to provide an economic application and to show that the framework can be applied to a wide range of other macroeconomic games.

We explore certain structural elements of venture capital investment, focusing on the role of venture capital as an asset class dedicated to technology investment. The structural role of technology as contributing to the total factor productivity is captured through the use of endogenous growth mechanisms as found in Romer (1990) and Rivera-Batiz and Romer (1991). In the first chapter, we explain certain elements of the two recessions in the first decade of the 21st century by combining these endogenous growth mechanisms with a financial accelerator in the market for production capital to capture the financial elements associated with decreased leverage after a financial crisis. In the second chapter, we assess the impact of policies in the late 1970s which largely created venture capital by encouraging technology investment to occur through debt contracts rather than equity contracts. We explain a set of stylized facts by contrasting a debt mechanism and an equity mechanism for an asset that derives its value from returns to technology goods in a stochastic endogenous growth model. Our final chapter deals with the disposition of venture capitalists towards Knightian uncertainty. We show that an uncertainty-loving behavior of venture capitalists leads to a Pareto improvement in the economy. However, the magnitude of the effect of changes in disposition towards uncertainty is small, implying that bubbles in the venture capital market caused by this type of uncertainty-loving behavior should not be a great concern for investors and policy makers.

Cette thèse concerne la coordination en univers des multi-agents et en particulier dans des contextes de crise. Nous assistons actuellement à un accroissement du nombre de crises, non seulement des catastrophes naturelles (ouragan Katrina, tremblement de terre d'Haïti, ...) mais aussi humanitaires (crise des réfugiés syriens en Europe, printemps Arabe, émeutes de Baltimore, ...). Dans toutes ces crises, les différents acteurs œuvrant pour leurs résolutions doivent agir rapidement et simultanément, afin de contrôler et réduire les impacts de la crise sur le monde réel. Pour atteindre cet objectif commun aussi rapidement et efficacement que possible, ces acteurs (police, forces militaires, organisations médicales) doivent mettre en commun leurs ressources et compétences respectives, collaborer et agir de manière coordonnée, le plus souvent en suivant un plan qui indique la répartition du travail et les échanges entre eux. Par coordination, nous entendons tout le travail nécessaire pour élaborer ou adapter le plan de résolution de crises et mettre en commun les compétences et les ressources de tous les intervenants afin d'atteindre l'objectif commun (la résolution de crise) de manière efficace. Les plans de résolution de crise sont la plupart du temps disponibles dans un format textuel définissant les acteurs impliqués, leurs rôles et des recommandations pour leurs coordinations dans les différentes étapes du cycle de vie de crise (anticipation, préparation, résolution de la crise, retour d'expérience). Bien que les plans dans un format textuel soient faciles à manipuler par les intervenants pris individuellement, il n'existe pas de moyens directs pour les analyser, simuler, adapter, améliorer et ils peuvent avoir diverses interprétations, ce qui les rend difficile à gérer en temps réel et dans une situation où les acteurs sont géographiquement distribués. Au regard de ces observations, il devient indispensable de faire une modélisation de ces plans textuels afin d'en avoir une représentation précise, éviter toute ambiguïté, faciliter la coordination entre les intervenants et enfin faciliter la gestion ainsi que la résolution de crises. L'objectif de cette thèse est de contribuer à l'ingénierie de la coordination dans les domaines de crise en fournissant une approche globale qui prend en compte sans les confondre et en les articulant deux aspects essentiels de la gestion de crises : l'aspect organisationnel et l'aspect tâche. Dans cette perspective, notre approche combine deux paradigmes: BPM (Business Process Management) et les systèmes multi-agents, et fournit un algorithme de traduction entre leurs concepts. BPM fournit une vue globale de la coordination du point de vue de la tâche à réaliser et facilite la validation, la simulation et l'intelligibilité des plans de résolution de la crise au moment de leur conception tout en permettant le suivi de leur exécution. Le paradigme multi-agent fournit, quant à lui, des abstractions sociales (des interactions de haut niveau et des structures organisationnelles : rôles, relations et interactions entre acteurs) pour modéliser, analyser et simuler une vue organisationnelle de la coordination en représentant la structure et le comportement du système développé au niveau macro, indépendamment de la structure interne des agents à un niveau micro. La contribution de cette thèse est un cadre conceptuel pour l'ingénierie de la coordination. / This thesis is about coordination in multi-agent universes and particularly in crisis contexts. Recently, we have witnessed an increasing number of crises, not only natural disasters (hurricane Katrina, Haiti earthquake, ...) but also man-made ones (Syrian refugees crisis in Europe, Arabic spring, rioting in Baltimore, ...). In such crisis, the different actors involved in the resolution have to act rapidly and simultaneously in order to ease an efficient control and reduce its impacts on the real world. To achieve this common goal as quickly and efficiently as possible, these actors (police, military forces, medical organizations) must join their respective resources and skills to collaborate and act in a coordinated way, most often by following a plan that specifies the expected flow of work between them. By coordination, we mean all the work needed for putting resolution plans and all stakeholders' skills and resources together in order to reach the common goal (crisis resolution) in an efficient way. Crisis resolution plans are most of the time available in a textual format defining the actors, their roles and coordination recommendations in the different steps of crisis life-cycle (mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery). While plans in a printed document format are easy to manipulate by stakeholders when taken individually, they do not provide direct means to be analysed, simulated, adapted or improved and may have various different interpretations. Therefore they are difficult to manage in real time and in a distributed setting. Given these observations, it becomes useful to model these textual plans to have an accurate representation of them, to reduce ambiguity and to support coordination between stakeholders and ease an efficient control and crisis resolution. The goal of this PhD thesis is to contribute to coordination engineering in crisis domains by providing a comprehensive approach that considers both organizational and task aspects in a coherent conceptual framework. In this perspective, our approach combines Business Process and Multi-Agent paradigms and provides a mapping algorithm between their concepts. BPM (Business Process Modelling) provides an aggregate view of the coordination through the task aspect and so doing eases the validation, the simulation, the intelligibility of crisis resolution plans at design time and its monitoring at run time. The Multi-Agent paradigm provides social abstractions (high-level interactions and organization structures) to model, analyse and simulate an organizational view of the coordination by representing the structure and the behaviour of the system being developed at a macro level, independently of the internal structure of agents (micro level). The contribution of this thesis is a coordination framework, which consists of three related components: i) A design and development approach (design/discovery, analysis, simulation) that provides means (recommendations, formalisms, life-cycle, algorithms) to produce (agent and process-based) coordination models from a textual plan and/or event based log files, ii) A mapping algorithm deriving BPMN process schemas onto multi-agent structures, iii) Coordination evaluation metrics. We extend the works of Grossi and define formal metrics that allow the evaluation of the quality (efficiency, robustness and flexibility) of multi-agent system organizations. We have applied this framework to the Ho Chi Minh City Tsunami resolution plan.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-01-13T13:27:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2015-09-22. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2016-01-13T13:31:09Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000856006.pdf: 1011962 bytes, checksum: ae9cc4f639460c8cca986610b4227af7 (MD5) / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) / O capitalismo se reproduz através de processos contraditórios. O sistema, em sua fase mais moderna, de acumulação financeirizada, tende a crises especulativas que os mecanismos de mercado não são capazes de regular. Esse é o argumento de teóricos da corrente pós-keynesiana que se propõem a investigar quais comportamentos geram e agravam crises financeiras. Depois da crise iniciada no sistema financeiro norte-americano, Hyman Minsky (1919-1996), pouco abordado até então, voltou ao debate sobre o funcionamento do sistema financeiro e sua regulamentação. Para muitos, a trajetória percorrida pela economia mundial e a ruptura do sistema financeiro se enquadram nas análises do autor, a ponto de ser possível considerar ter havido um Momento Minsky: um profundo e repentino colapso precedido por calmaria e bonança. Através da caracterização da abordagem de Minsky, essa dissertação se propõe a avançar no entendimento do sistema financeiro à procura das causas e corretivos da fragilidade financeira ilustrada pela crise subprime recente / Capitalism reproduces itself through contradictory processes. The system, in its latest phase of financialized accumulation tends to speculative crisis that market mechanisms are not able to regulate. This is the post-Keynesians theoretical argument that intend to investigate what behaviors determine and aggravate the crisis. After the crisis that had trigger in the US financial system, the Post Keynesian Hyman Minsky (1919 - 1996), little explored so far, returned to the discourses of the function of the financial system and its regulation. For many, the road taken by the world economy and the breakdown of the financial system fit into the analysis of the author as to be possible to consider that there was a Minsky moment: a deep and sudden collapse preceded by lull and calm. Through the characterization of Minsky's methodology, this dissertation aims to advance the understanding of the financial system in search for the causes and remedies of Minsky fragility illustrated by the recent subprime crisis

Made available in DSpace on 2016-01-13T13:27:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2015-09-25. Added 1 bitstream(s) on 2016-01-13T13:32:42Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000856017.pdf: 639409 bytes, checksum: 99fc758e9c88cc3a5204c20e669cb994 (MD5) / A reprodução do sistema do capital mudou. Isto não significa dizer que a acumulação capitalista prescinde agora dos esquemas reprodutivos ligados ao capital industrial, como descrito por Marx; nem que a geração de valor não se dê mais pela força de trabalho subordinada ao capital. A modificação se dá justamente pela subsunção das formas clássicas a um novo componente estrutural: a financeirização. Pois o que surge é um novo regime de acumulação, predominantemente financeirizado, reconfigurando a reprodução do sistema e impondo sua lógica. Por isso, a esfera financeira aumenta em importância em relação à esfera produtiva, aumento este que deve ser entendido como concomitante aumento do papel desempenhado pela forma funcional autonomizada do capital: o capital portador de juros. O capital financeiro se apresenta, pois, como a etapa mais avançada do sistema capitalista e se distingue pelo caráter universal e permanente das atuações especulativas e de criação contábil de capitais fictícios; a constituição de um complexo aparato financeiro se faz necessária pela natureza intrinsicamente especulativa da gestão dos grupos industriais, dada a prática de ampliar ficticiamente o valor do capital existente. E nessa nova configuração da reprodução capitalista não só a atuação do Estado se altera, mas também a forma como o Estado se relaciona com a própria reprodução do sistema. Desvendar estas novas determinações entre Estado e capital, portanto, se faz necessário se se quer compreender de maneira mais clara a crise estrutural do capital na contemporaneidade, inserindo-as como elemento central a esta crise. Pois o Estado capitalista representa uma forma orgânica do capital, vital ao seu processo de reprodução social, seja em suas funções políticas centrais ou naquelas intimamente vinculadas às suas funções econômicas, ligadas ao processo de acumulação e reprodução. Portanto, este trabalho... / The reproduction of the capitalist system has changed. It does not mean that the capitalist accumulation now does not depend on the reproductive schemes associated to the industrial capital, as described by Marx; or that the value generation does not occurs anymore for the workforce subordinated to capital. The change occurs exactly in the subsumption of the classical forms to a new structural component: the financialization. What emerges is a new regime of accumulation, predominantly financialized, reconfiguring the system reproduction and imposing its logic. Therefore, the financial sphere increases in importance regarding the productive sphere, and such increase should be understood as a concomitant increase in the role played by the autonomized functional form of capital: the interest-bearing capital. Therefore, the financial capital appears as the most advanced stage of the capitalist system and is distinguished by the universal and permanent character of speculative performances and accounting creation of fictitious capital; the establishment of a complex financial apparatus is necessary because of the intrinsically speculative nature of the management of industrial groups, through the practice of extending fictitiously the value of the existing capital. And in this new configuration of the capitalist reproduction, not only the State action changes, but the relation of State with its own reproduction system also changes. Therefore, it is necessary to unveil these new determinations between the state and the capital if one wants to understand more clearly the structural crisis of the capital in the contemporary times, inserting them as a central element of this crisis. Since the capitalist state represents an organic form of capital, essential to its social reproduction process, either on their main political functions or on those strictly connected to their economic functions, associated to the accumulation and reproduction process...

Orientador: Prof. Dr. Hélio Afonso Ghizoni Teive / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Ciências da Saúde, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Medicina Interna. Defesa : Curitiba, 03/08/2017 / Inclui referências : f. 83-90 / Resumo: JUSTIFICATIVA: crises não epilépticas psicogênicas (CNEPs) são comuns. Contudo, há frequente dificuldade diagnóstica e para condução dos casos. Crises epilépticas (CEs) constituem uma emergência médica e sua abordagem imediata e correta é essencial, particularmente em ambiente de pronto atendimento. Várias situações clínicas podem mimetizar CEs, conduzindo a erros e prescrições inadequadas de fármacos antiepilépticos (FAEs), tanto emergencialmente, quanto em ambiente ambulatorial. CNEPs equivocadamente interpretadas como CEs levam a incrementos em morbidade e custo. Emergencistas, enfermeiros, estudantes de Medicina do último ano, médicos residentes e plantonistas em geral são os primeiros a abordar estes casos e sua impressão inicial é extremamente importante na condução dos mesmos. Nosso estudo aborda a fenomenologia das CNEPs, determina a acurácia diagnóstica para esta condição entre os profissionais citados, propõe e valida um instrumento diagnóstico breve, com base semiológica. MÉTODOS: Este estudo foi concebido em duas partes. Na primeira na fase foram avaliadas CNEPs e CEs para identificação de sinais semiológicos que possibilitassem a discriminação entre estes dois tipos de crises. Estes achados foram comparados com os dados descritos na literatura e foram então separados 6 sinais para compor um instrumento clínico, visando a diferenciação de CNEPs e CEs. Na segunda parte deste estudo, quatro grupos de profissionais (53 enfermeiros, 34 médicos emergencistas, 33 estudantes do último ano de Medicina e 12 residentes de Neurologia) participaram de um curto programa de treinamento, consistindo em uma determinação de acurácia diagnóstica inicial (pré-teste), uma sessão de instrução de 30 minutos, incluindo o instrumento diagnóstico breve e finalmente uma nova determinação de acurácia póstreinamento (pós-teste). As curvas de aprendizagem foram estudadas. RESULTADOS: foram identificados 27 sinais observados nas CNEPs e CEs dos pacientes analisados, todos previamente descritos na literatura. Destes foram separados 6 sinais para compor um instrumento para aplicação clínica. Estes sinais tinham como características o fácil e imediato reconhecimento, dispensando a necessidade de dados da história clínica, testemunhos de circunstantes ou dados sobre a duração da crise. As diferentes categorias de profissionais não mostraram diferenças significativas em sua acurácia diagnóstica para CNEPs ou CEs, ao longo das fases de pré e pós-testes. Entretanto, todos os grupos se beneficiaram significativamente do programa de treinamento apresentado. CONCLUSÕES: os resultados obtidos permitiram identificar sinais clínicos com potencial discriminatório entre CNEPs e CEs e produziram validação para um novo instrumento diagnóstico breve, com fundamentação exclusivamente semiológica. Adicionalmente, nossos resultados demonstram que medidas educativas podem contribuir na identificação de CNEPs por equipes em plantões de emergências médicas, o que poderia melhorar o atendimento primário e reduzir custos e a morbi-letalidade nestes pacientes. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: crises não epilépticas psicogênicas, epilepsia, semiologia / Abstract: RATIONALE: Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) are common, often misdiagnosed and poorly approached regarding to treatment. Epileptic seizures (ES) are often seen as a medical emergency and their immediate and accurate recognition is pivotal in providing acute care. A number of clinical situations may mimic ES, potentially leading to misdiagnosis at the emergency room and to inadequate prescription of antiepileptic drugs (AED) in the acute and chronic settings. PNES play a major role in this scenario, leading to delay in the correct diagnosis and consequent increase in treatment morbidity and cost. Emergency physicians, nurse clinicians, senior medical students, medical residents and oncall personnel often conduct the initial assessment of these patients and their impression may be decisive in the prehospital approach to seizures. In our study we evaluate PNES phenomenology and sought to investigate the accuracy of PNES diagnosis among these professionals involved in the initial assistance to patients with ES and PNES. We also proposed and validated a brief diagnostic tool for discrimination between PNES and ES. METHODS: this study was designed with two components to be carried out together. First, we evaluated PNES and ES seeking to identify potential discriminators between these seizures. These findings were compared with the literature and we developed a 6-item diagnostic tool aiming to distinguish PNES from ES. On phase two, 53 registered nurses, 34 emergency physicians, 33 senior year medical students, and 12 neurology residents took a short training program consisting of an initial video-based seizure assessment test (pretest), a 30-minute presentation including the 6-item diagnostic tool and then a videobased reassessment (posttest). Baseline and learning curves were determined. RESULTS: We identified 27 signs listed as potential discriminators between PNES and ES, all previously described in the literature. We then set up a brief diagnostic tool including 6 of these signs. Selection was based on easy and immediate recognition of each sign, not requiring information coming from clinical history, witnesses reports or seizure duration. The distinct professional categories showed no significant differences in their ability to diagnose PNES and ES on both pre and posttests. All groups improved diagnostic skills after the instructional program. CONCLUSIONS: Results aided to determine the best identifiable PNES clinical signs and to provide initial validation to a novel diagnostic instrument. In addition, our results showed that educative measures might help in the identification of PNES by first responders, which may decrease the treatment gap. KEY-WORDS: psychogenic nonepileptic seizures, epilepsy, semiology