FundaÃÃo de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Cearà / A cultura do cafà se caracteriza hà dÃcadas como uma importante fonte de divisas para o Brasil, sendo em muito responsÃvel pelo seu crescimento e desenvolvimento econÃmico. No CearÃ, seus tempos Ãureos datam de 1950, na Ãpoca se colhia na serra de Baturità um cafà arÃbico reconhecido internacionalmente que enriqueceu muitos produtores. Mas esta regiÃo, atualmente, à uma Ãrea de preservaÃÃo ambiental (APA) formada principalmente por quatro municÃpios, Aratuba, Guaramiranga, Mulungu e Pacoti, que apresentam produÃÃo de cafà com sÃrias restriÃÃes. Os produtores sofrem pela especulaÃÃo imobiliÃria, a instabilidade dos preÃos e as baixas produtividades; como resistÃncia, tais produtores se enquadraram na produÃÃo do cafà ecolÃgico em busca de melhores diferenciais de preÃos. Assim, para o presente estudo, formularam-se os seguintes objetivos: caracterizar o processo produtivo da cultura do cafà ecolÃgico na APA de BaturitÃ; e, avaliar a sua rentabilidade sob condiÃÃes determinista e de risco. Para alcanÃar estes objetivos foram utilizados dados primÃrios, referentes à safra de 2007, e dados secundÃrios. Pelos resultados identificou-se um processo de produÃÃo sob condiÃÃes de sequeiro com pouca utilizaÃÃo de mÃo-de-obra familiar, reduzidos tratos culturais, nenhuma mecanizaÃÃo, inexpressivo uso de insumos e elevados gastos com mÃo-de-obra. A avaliaÃÃo determinista apresenta-se com alta rentabilidade mÃdia, margens e lucros mÃdios elevados, e pontos de equilÃbrio de rendimento, em sua maioria, abaixo da produÃÃo mÃdia; foram identificados melhores resultados para os menores proprietÃrios de terra, principalmente para os que tÃm mÃquinas de beneficiamento de cafÃ, assim como para os maiores proprietÃrios sem este tipo de investimento. No cÃlculo do valor estimado da terra, ocupada com plantio de cafà ecolÃgico, constatou-se preÃos bem superiores ao estipulado pelo INCRA no mais alto limite de valorizaÃÃo, porÃm com valor ainda inferior ao preÃo de mercado especulativo da terra na APA. Na anÃlise de Monte Carlo, regra geral, se identificou risco reduzido para a cultura; os piores resultados foram para os produtores com mÃquinas de beneficiamento de cafÃ; os maiores lucros mÃdios foram alcanÃados pelos pequenos proprietÃrios de terra, sem mÃquina beneficiadora. Os mÃdios e grandes proprietÃrios de terra mostraram-se mais rentÃveis na anÃlise de risco do que na determinista. Em nenhuma simulaÃÃo foi observado um valor estimado para a terra superior ao preÃo especulativo de mercado, mas em todas as simulaÃÃes seus valores mÃdios estimados para a terra foram superiores ao mais alto limite de valoraÃÃo apresentados pelo INCRA. / The coffee crop is characterized for decades as an important source of wealth for Brazil, being very responsible for their growth and economic development. In CearÃ, its good time was as of 1950, at the time it was harvested in the Baturità hills an Arabic coffee internationally recognized that enriched many producers. But the region currently is an area of environmental preservation (APA) formed mainly by four municipalities, Aratuba, Guaramiranga, Mulungu and Pacoti, which have production of coffee with serious restrictions. Producers suffered by property speculation, instability in prices and the low yield, as resistance, such producers fall in the production of green coffee in search for better differential of prices. Thus, for the present study, formulated the following objective: to characterize the production process of crop ecological coffee in the APA BaturitÃ; and, to evaluate her profitability under conditions of risk and deterministic. To achieve these objectives a primary data were used, relating to the harvest of 2007, and secondary data. For the results identified a process of production under dry conditions with little use of labor-family, low cultural treatments, no mechanization, use of inputs and expressionless high spending on labor. The deterministic assessment presents with profitability average high, margins and profits average high, and points of balance of yield, mostly, below the average production, were identified better outcomes for children of land owners, especially for those coffee Beneficiation machines, as well as for the largest owners without this type of investment. In calculating the estimated value of the land, occupied with planting of green coffee, it is well above the price set by INCRA in the highest limit for recovery, but with value still lower than the market price of land speculative the APA. In the analysis of Monte Carlo, generally, it has been identified a reduced farming risk, the results were worse for producers to benefit from coffee machines, the highest average profits were achieved by smaller owners of land without benefited machinery. The medium and large owners of land were more profitable in risk analysis than in the deterministic. In no simulation it has been observed an estimated value of the land above the price of market speculation, but in all its simulations estimated average values for the land were higher than the highest limit of valuation submitted by INCRA.

The purpose of this master&rsquo / s thesis is to evaluate the performance of investment companies, namely Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and Closed-End Funds (CEFs) in Turkey. In this study, three different models are used to evaluate the risk adjusted performances of Turkish investment companies. These models are: 1) the single-factor CAPM / 2) the Fama-French three-factor model / and 3) the Carhart&rsquo / s four factor model. The results of this study indicate that for the sample period from January 1997 to December 2009, Turkish REITs and Turkish CEFs neither overperform nor underperform the overall market. Intercepts in almost all models are statistically significantly not different from zero, implying that both REITs and CEFs are earning their expected returns. The results are robust to different models used in this study. Among employed models, the Fama-French three-factor model is the best in explaining the returns on both REITs and CEFs. In general, coefficients of the size and the book-to-market equity risk factors are significant and positive. The explanatory power of the regressions does not improve with the Carhart&rsquo / s four-factor model, since momentum factors have statistically insignificant coefficients in all regressions. Findings of this study have an important implication for the efficiency of the Istanbul Stock Exchange. The inability of professional money managers to beat the overall market could be taken as an evidence in favor of the ISE being either semi-strong or strong form efficient. On the other hand, lack of skills on the part of Turkish fund managers might be another explanation for their inability to surpass the performance of the overall market.

This study is concerned with the lead-lag relationship between Turkish spot equity and derivatives markets. In the study, the spot equity market is represented by the ISE-30 Index. In order to compare the structure of the two markets, the futures contract written on the ISE-30 Index, namely TURKDEX-ISE 30, is chosen to represent the derivatives market. The analysis is performed over the sample period beginning February 4, 2005 and ending on December 10, 2010 which actually covers the entire time span from the establishment of the TURKDEX market until the end of last year. This sample period is examined on the basis of 5-minute intervals during the trading day, enabling a more detailed and accurate evaluation of the lead-lag power of the markets. The main methods applied to examine the structure of information flow between the markets are co-integration and causality analyses. Different approaches of these basic methods are employed as well in order to provide robust results. An additional robustness check is provided through examining the relationship between the markets by using both raw and filtered prices. ARMA filtering is performed on the prices and these findings are compared to those obtained by raw prices in order to avoid the problem of infrequent trading. Outcomes of both raw and filtered price analyses reveal that in 2006, 2007 and 2009 the relationship between the markets is bi-directional, whereas in 2008 and 2010, futures market strictly leads the spot market. Filtered and raw analyses do not have a definitive conclusion regarding the lead-lag relationship in 2005. For this year, while the raw data support a bi-directional relationship, ARMA filtering indicates that the spot market leads the derivatives market.

Using recent criticism on speculation and disability in addition to archival materials, “A Public Duty: Medicine and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture” demonstrates that reform-minded nineteenth-century authors drew upon the representational power of public health to express excitement and anxiety about the United States’ emerging economic and political prominence. Breaking with a critical tradition holding that the professionalization of medicine and authorship served primarily to support and define an ascending middle class, I argue that the authors such as Robert Montgomery Bird, Fanny Fern, George Washington Cable, and Pauline Hopkins fuse the rhetoric of economic policy and public health to advocate that the era’s disenfranchised “ill” (classified as such due to demographic factors or disability/disease) be recognized as worthy citizens capable of enhancing the economic and cultural wealth of the nation. While many nineteenth-century authors drew upon the ability for sickness and death to unify disparate peoples, such instances often tend toward sentimentalism, imparting the message of inclusion by invoking readers’ sympathy. The authors included in my project, however, do not fit this mode. Instead, they used their works to insinuate that looking after the health and welfare of one’s fellow humans was simply good economics. In featuring issues of public health rather than private disability, depicting illness realistically in accordance with medical treatises and beliefs of the period, and showing the widespread consequences of disease these writers rely on their readers’ desire for economic prosperity, rather than affect, as a catalyst for social solidarity in a capitalist society. As such, my project causes us to rethink how the ascent of the novel not only helped define, but also challenged and critiqued, the identity-politics of an emerging middle class. By showing the authors studied in “A Public Duty” used literature’s pedagogical potential to argue the “sick” literally and figuratively had worth, I demonstrates these writers’ works help create and support a reconceptualization of the political body suiting a country poised to assume global prominence and urged their readers to see the variety of people living in the United States as a source of national innovation and strength.

Event stream processing (ESP) applications enable the real-time processing of continuous flows of data. Algorithmic trading, network monitoring, and processing data from sensor networks are good examples of applications that traditionally rely upon ESP systems. In addition, technological advances are resulting in an increasing number of devices that are network enabled, producing information that can be automatically collected and processed. This increasing availability of on-line data motivates the development of new and more sophisticated applications that require low-latency processing of large volumes of data. ESP applications are composed of an acyclic graph of operators that is traversed by the data. Inside each operator, the events can be transformed, aggregated, enriched, or filtered out. Some of these operations depend only on the current input events, such operations are called stateless. Other operations, however, depend not only on the current event, but also on a state built during the processing of previous events. Such operations are, therefore, named stateful. As the number of ESP applications grows, there are increasingly strong requirements, which are often difficult to satisfy. In this dissertation, we address two challenges created by the use of stateful operations in a ESP application: (i) stateful operators can be bottlenecks because they are sensitive to the order of events and cannot be trivially parallelized by replication; and (ii), if failures are to be tolerated, the accumulated state of an stateful operator needs to be saved, saving this state traditionally imposes considerable performance costs. Our approach is to evaluate the use of speculation to address these two issues. For handling ordering and parallelization issues in a stateful operator, we propose a speculative approach that both reduces latency when the operator must wait for the correct ordering of the events and improves throughput when the operation in hand is parallelizable. In addition, our approach does not require that user understand concurrent programming or that he or she needs to consider out-of-order execution when writing the operations. For fault-tolerant applications, traditional approaches have imposed prohibitive performance costs due to pessimistic schemes. We extend such approaches, using speculation to mask the cost of fault tolerance.

[Truncated abstract] This thesis examines and compares the performance of three classes of stock trading strategies in the Australian stock market from 1980 to 2002. ... The first segment of this thesis examines some simple technical trading rules with a twostep methodology ... Our standard test results show that technical trading rules generate excess returns higher than that of the buy-and-hold portfolio equivalent prior to 1991, but generate lower returns in the period post-1991. Bootstrap test results also show that addressing nonnormality, time-dependence and conditional heteroskedasticity in the data reverses the standard test outcome of predictability ... In addition, our sub-sample results also show technical trading rules becoming less profitable over time ... The second segment of this thesis examines trading rules based on the forecasts of four time-series models: the AR(1), AR(1)-GARCH(1,1), AR(1)-GARCH(1,1)-M and AR(1)- EGARCH(1,1) models. These time-series trading rules were examined with standard t-tests and found to be significantly less profitable compared to technical trading rules. Subsample results also show the time-series trading rules losing profitability over time, which supports the conjecture that the Australian stock market became increasingly efficient over time. The third segment of this thesis examines trading strategies based on various combinations of technical trading rules and time-series models ... Due to the weak performance of the time-series trading rules, our results show that combining technical rules with time-series models do not lead to improved forecast accuracy. Sub-sample results again show a strong decline in profitability post-1991, suggesting that technological advancements in the ASX since 1991 enhance market efficiency such that the above simple stock trading strategies are no longer profitable.

Made available in DSpace on 2010-04-20T21:00:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 4 João Luiz Guillaumon lopes.pdf.jpg: 2499 bytes, checksum: f6666d34fbc5c3016083ccc8e871f374 (MD5) João Luiz Guillaumon lopes.pdf.txt: 115021 bytes, checksum: 00195e9f62622b7d676af7d85f466d6a (MD5) license.txt: 4712 bytes, checksum: 4dea6f7333914d9740702a2deb2db217 (MD5) João Luiz Guillaumon lopes.pdf: 772852 bytes, checksum: a3d9d1fe46c86d2e84d2c17364188624 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-02-03T00:00:00Z / The main objective of this study is to investigate the motivations and the dynamics on the use of currency derivatives by non-financial Brazilian firms, on over-the-counter contracts, using a unique database of operations actually contracted by these companies with a large international bank from 2003 to 2008. Although some studies point to the influence of a speculative component in manager’s decisions (resulting from an attempt of predicting market changes), the effective impact of this behavior on the companies’ operations is still little known, as are its implications for the financial management of risks and corporate governance. I find strong evidence that the decisions to commit to and unwind derivatives positions are influenced by a speculative view at some level. Moreover, such situations are hard to be identified a priori as they are easily confused with operations designed to reduce companies’ risk. / O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar as motivações e a dinâmica no uso de derivativos de moedas por parte de empresas não-financeiras brasileiras, em contratos de balcão, a partir de um banco de dados único, que contém operações efetivamente contratadas por estas empresas junto a um grande banco internacional de 2003 a 2008. Embora pesquisas em outros países apontem para a influência de um componente especulativo (resultado de uma tentativa de previsão de mercado) nas decisões dos gestores, o efetivo impacto disto nas decisões da empresa ainda é pouco conhecido, bem como suas implicações para a gestão financeira de riscos e governança corporativa. Os resultados do presente estudo revelam que existem fortes indícios de que as decisões de tomada e desmonte de posições em derivativos sejam bastante influenciadas por uma visão especulativa. Mais ainda, tais situações são difíceis de serem identificadas a priori por confundirem-se com as operações destinadas à redução de risco da companhia.

This dissertation examines the role of the fundamental economic variables (price levels, interest rates, and income levels) in the determination of foreign exchange rates during the period 1973-1978. Purchasing power parity, the International Fisher Effect, and the relationship of exchange rates with income levels through the marginal propensity to import were integrated, as suggested by the literature, and a fairly reasonable specification of a model for exchange rate determination was measured. The results of speculation tests indicate destabilizing results for some currencies and stabilizing results for the others; the coefficient of expectation tests, however, lend support to the destabilizing hypothesis. The conclusion of the research, therefore, is that the exchange rates of the major industrial countries which are of prime importance to the international financier and investor, and to the student of international finance and trade, are primarily determined, not by the fundamental economic variables, but by speculative forces which are believed to be of a destabilizing nature.

Thesis "The use of currency futures in the business in terms of CR" deals with financial derivatives. Defines the various types of derivatives, their history and development of currency futures and forward contracts in the CR and in the world. Another part is devoted to the use of currency futures and forwards in the business in the Czech Republic. The thesis is to evaluate the evolution of exchange rates EUR/CZK and USD/CZK.

The accelerated urban expansion that occurs with the city of Santa Maria/RS is also connected with the intense process of irregular occupation of its perimeter urban. Known as the "city of intrusion," Santa Maria has experienced, particularly in the last ten years, mass occupation of motorway BR 287 margins with four occupations, and three of them within the West and South-West. The craving for housing worthy according to your profile cost-effective comes bringing hundreds of people to occupy public domain areas unsuitable for housing facility. However, the ease of access to goods and services does, in many cases, the risk condition awareness of those people who created an identity with the place where they live for more than five years. Victims often speculation popular public areas, there are cases themselves residents ultimately becomes estate agents acting on the sale of real estate irregular profiting from the appreciation of these areas through access to equipment condition of neighbouring districts and the conquest of new which is thus also diversified trade training in these occupations. On the other hand, there are those individuals that the real purpose boils intrinsically in the conquest, aware that they are installed in the areas of risk. Are people that unemployment and/or underemployment the renders payment of rent and awaiting tirelessly for a solution of the public. Currently, the programme for accelerated growth of the Federal Government has made possible the realization of housing programmes for a range of income until a minimum wage and has provided the process of relocation of many families in areas at risk in Santa Maria/RS. Covered with one of the city's residential programs, residents of the occupation on the fringes of BR 287 of neighborhood Urlândia relocated in March 2009 for villas of 40,12 m² in blending Cipriano da Rocha, in. But as for occupations on the fringes of road in the West there is a consensus of the public authorities in relocate residents. The deadlock condition property is one of the major snags along the great demand homeless worthy who owns the city of Santa Maria, without counting the great strength of residents of Santa Marta that speculation is very strong. We need public housing policies covering a dignified housing condition that consider the size of families, their socio-economic conditions and, finally, grant the right to the city. / A expansão urbana acelerada que ocorre com a cidade de Santa Maria/RS está também ligada com o intenso processo de ocupação irregular de seu perímetro urbano. Conhecida como a Cidade das Invasões , Santa Maria tem vivenciado, principalmente nos últimos dez anos, a ocupação em massa das margens da rodovia BR 287 com quatro ocupações, sendo três delas situadas na zona oeste e uma na zona sudoeste. O anseio da população por moradia digna de acordo com seu perfil econômico vem trazendo centenas de pessoas a ocupar áreas de domínio público impróprias para instalação de moradias. Todavia, a facilidade de acesso a bens e serviços faz desprezar, em muitos casos, a consciência da condição de risco dessas pessoas que criaram uma identidade com o local onde vivem há mais de cinco anos. Vítimas, muitas vezes de grilagem dessas áreas públicas, os moradores destas ocupações vem renovando as funções destes espaços antes de reserva e posteriormente de moradia e/ou comércio e serviços aproveitando-se da valorização das estruturas em meio à condição de acesso a equipamentos urbanos dos bairr os em que estão instalados o que vem acarretando a prática da especulação imobiliária. Em contrapartida, também existem aqueles indivíduos em que o real propósito se resume intrinsecamente na conquista da moradia digna, conscientes de que estão instalados em áreas de risco. São pessoas em que o desemprego e/ou o subemprego as impossibilita do pagamento de aluguel e aguardam incansavelmente por uma solução por parte do poder público. Atualmente, o Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento do governo Federal tem possibilitado a concretização de programas habitacionais para uma faixa de renda de até um salário mínimo e tem proporcionado o processo de realocação de muitas famílias que se encontram em áreas de risco em Santa Maria/RS. Porém, em muitos casos, a burocracia do impasse da condição de propriedade é um dos grandes empecilhos para o processo de realocação junto à grande demanda sem moradia digna que possui a cidade de Santa Maria, sem contar com a grande resistência de alguns moradores destas áreas de ocupação em que a especulação imobiliária é muito forte. Contudo, se faz necessário que haja políticas públicas de habitação que contemplem uma condição de moradia digna que considere o tamanho das famílias, suas condições sócio-econômicas e que, enfim, conceda o direito à cidade.