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This paper aims to analyse the volatility of the fixed income market from 11 countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, USA, Germany and Japan) from January 2000 to December 2011 by examining the interbank interest rates from each market.

To the volatility of interest rates returns, the study used models of auto-regressive conditional heteroscedasticity, autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH), generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH), exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (EGARCH), threshold generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (TGARCH) and periodic generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (PGARCH), and a combination of these with autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models, checking which of these processes were more efficient in capturing volatility of interest rates of each of the sample countries.

The results suggest that for most markets, studied volatility is best modelled by asymmetric GARCH processes – in this case the EGARCH – demonstrating that bad news leads to a higher increase in the volatility of these markets than good news. In addition, the causes of increased volatility seem to be more associated with events occurring internally in each country, as changes in macroeconomic policies, than the overall external events.

It is expected that this study has contributed to a better understanding of the volatility of interest rates and the main factors affecting this market.

Este estudio analiza la volatilidad del mercado de renta fija de once países (Brasil, Rusia, India, China, Sudáfrica, Argentina, Chile, México, Estados Unidos, Alemania y Japón) de enero de 2000 a diciembre de 2011, mediante el examen de las tasas de interés interbancarias de cada mercado.

Para la volatilidad de los retornos de las tasas de interés, se utilizaron modelos de heteroscedasticidad condicional autorregresiva: ARCH, GARCH, EGARCH, TGARCH y PGARCH, y una combinación de estos con modelos ARIMA, comprobando cuáles de los procesos eran más eficientes para capturar la volatilidad de interés de cada uno de los países de la muestra.

Los resultados sugieren que para la mayoría de los mercados estudiados la volatilidad es mejor modelada por procesos GARCH asimétricos —en este caso el EGARCH— demostrando que las malas noticias conducen a un mayor incremento en la volatilidad de estos mercados que las buenas noticias. Además, las causas de una mayor volatilidad parecen estar más asociadas a eventos que ocurren internamente en cada país, como cambios en las políticas macroeconómicas, que los eventos externos generales.

Se espera que este estudio contribuya a un mejor entendimiento de la volatilidad de las tasas de interés y de los principales factores que afectan a este mercado.

Ingreso fijo, Volatilidad, Países emergentes, Modelos ARCH-GARCH

Artículo de investigación

Preservation environments such as repositories need scalable and context-aware preservation planning and monitoring capabilities to ensure continued accessibility of content over time. This article identifies a number of gaps in the systems and mechanisms currently available and presents a new, innovative architecture for scalable decision-making and control in such environments.

The paper illustrates the state of the art in preservation planning and monitoring, highlights the key challenges faced by repositories to provide scalable decision-making and monitoring facilities, and presents the contributions of the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite to provide such capabilities.

The presented architecture makes preservation planning and monitoring context-aware through a semantic representation of key organizational factors, and integrates this with a business intelligence system that collects and reasons upon preservation-relevant information.

The architecture has been implemented in the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite. Integration with repositories and external information sources provide powerful preservation capabilities that can be freely integrated with virtually any repository.

The open nature of the software suite enables stewardship organizations to integrate the components with their own preservation environments and to contribute to the ongoing improvement of the systems.

The paper reports on innovative research and development to provide preservation capabilities. The results enable proactive, continuous preservation management through a context-aware planning and monitoring cycle integrated with operational systems.

This article aims to evaluate a new architecture for scalable decision-making and control in preservation environments for its ability to address five key goals: scalable content profiling; monitoring of compliance, risks and opportunities; efficient creation of trustworthy plans; context awareness; and loosely coupled preservation ecosystems. Scalable decision support and business intelligence capabilities are required to effectively secure content over time.

We conduct a systematic evaluation of the contributions of the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite to provide effective and scalable decision support capabilities. We discuss the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of advancing the state of art and report on a case study with a national library.

The system provides substantial capabilities for semi-automated, scalable decision-making and control of preservation functions in repositories. Well-defined interfaces allow a flexible integration with diverse institutional environments. The free and open nature of the tool suite further encourages global take-up in the repository communities.

The article discusses a number of bottlenecks and factors limiting the real-world scalability of preservation environments. This includes data-intensive processing of large volumes of information, automated quality assurance for preservation actions, and the element of human decision-making. We outline open issues and future work.

The open nature of the software suite enables stewardship organizations to integrate the components with their own preservation environments and to contribute to the ongoing improvement of the systems.

The paper reports on innovative research and development to provide preservation capabilities. The results of the assessment demonstrate how the system advances the control of digital preservation operations from ad hoc decision-making to proactive, continuous preservation management, through a context-aware planning and monitoring cycle integrated with operational systems.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the adoption of double entry bookkeeping at the Royal Treasury, Portugal, on its establishment in 1761 and the factors contributing to this development. The Royal Treasury was the first central government organization in Portugal to adopt double entry bookkeeping and was a crucial first step in the institutionalisation of the technique in Portuguese public administration.

Set firmly in the archive, this paper adopts new institutional sociology (NIS) to inform the findings of the local, time‐specific accounting policy and practice at the Portuguese Royal Treasury.

Embedded within the broader European context, this study identifies the key pressures exerted upon the Royal Treasury on its formation in 1761, which resulted in major accounting change within Portuguese central government from that date. The study provides further evidence of the importance of the state in the institutionalization of accounting practices by means of coercive pressures and highlights for Portugal the importance of individual actors who, as powerful change agents, made key decisions that influenced accounting change.

This study examines a major instance of accounting change in European central government and broadens the application of NIS in accounting history research to a different country – Portugal – and to a different time – the eighteenth century. It also serves to illuminate the difficulties of collecting pertinent evidence pertaining to this long‐dated time period in identifying certain forms of institutional pressures.

This paper explores which market and product category characteristics could influence the use of foreign language brand names (i.e. whether a brand uses a foreign language versus local language brand name) in some of the largest Latin American countries.

Hypotheses are tested using 880 brands from 39 product categories and nine Latin American markets using a hierarchical logistic regression.

Results revealed that foreign language brand names are more likely to be used in product categories related to local infrastructure, high-tech and global community. In contrast, local language brand names are more likely to be used in product categories associated to subscriptions. Findings also suggest that Hofstede's national cultural dimensions are significant factors. Finally, the results revealed that foreign language brand names are more likely to be used in markets with a low level of foreign language proficiency.

This paper shows the importance of considering market and product category characteristics and their potential influence on local versus foreign language branding in Latin America – an ignored issue in previous research.

This paper aims to understand if a project work methodology proposed to students, based on an inquiry perspective and dealing with different dimensions of sustainable development, contributed to creating an interdisciplinary solution for a problem on sustainability challenged by food production and consumption, and also to understand if this methodological approach is perceived as important to their learning as professionals and citizens. Data were collected by direct observation, a questionnaire applied to the students and students’ individual reflections.

This paper aims to present the research results of the impact of a pedagogical approach on students, implemented as a part of the Doctoral Programme in Sustainability Science, which was designed following an innovative model at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. The main drivers include building a new body of interdisciplinary knowledge leading to the application of science to address real problems towards transdisciplinary education.

The results suggest great potential for an inquiry perspective in trying to solve a real problem. Students’ proposals were realistic, viable and complementary enough to collectively contribute in response to the global problem. The use of approaches acquired from different areas of knowledge was clear, and the project methodology was well understood. Students considered the experience very rewarding in terms of learning and contributing positively to their personal and professional development.

This Doctoral programme is anchored in a progressive continuum encompassing holistic debates with a multidisciplinary team of professors in environments that promote interdisciplinary attitudes and new knowledge, and also project work aimed at guiding students to transdisciplinary learning, which constitutes an innovative form of dealing with the complex challenges created by the science of sustainability.

This chapter discusses the Brazilian redevelopment policy denominated urban operation. First implemented in São Paulo in the 1980s, it was included in the Brazilian federal urban legislation in 2001 as an instrument to promote the redevelopment of great urban areas through public–private partnerships. On the one hand, the local public administration would provide incentives to investments in a given project, especially by selling construction rights; on the other hand, the value captured would be reinvested in the same area, following a list of works that may include urban infrastructure and services. The main benefits expected are structural change without onus for the public administration; a more balanced urban growth, estimulating higher density in areas well served by urban infrastructure; and real estate valorization. Nevertheless, this chapter critically analyzes its early experiences in São Paulo, demonstrating an entrepreneurial and speculative logic of spatial production. In this sense, the chapter is structured in four parts. The first one presents the legal instrument, while the following two sections explore the two main aspects of its functioning: great urban projects and public–private partnerships. In the final section, the Urban Operation Faria Lima will be assessed, especially on its attempts to promote São Paulo as a global city. If it is not possible to generalize from this particular experience, it exposes the necessity of discussing how the instrument, now a federal policy, may be implemented in other Brazilian cities, which type of redevelopment it may promote and for whom.

Brazil has been increasing its participation in the international trade market, mainly due to agricultural and forestry products, as in the case of soybeans and cellulose. This growth led to the expansion of the logistics infrastructure and its use. An important example of this trend is the port of São Luís, MA, in northern Brazil, which saw an increase in exports via rail (more than 200% growth in 6 years) and, consequently, an increase in the circulation of trains within its port complex.

This work proposes a mixed-integer linear programming model for the daily train scheduling problem at this port. All trains operated by VLI, a logistics company, are scheduled to minimize the departure times in order to improve the dwell time of freight train cars.

The railroad system in this Brazilian port consists of two classification yards, five terminals and a double-track railway for circulation. Different products such as grains, minerals, cellulose, and fuels are transported. The model also incorporates different operations at terminals and occupation restrictions due to maintenance and the physical flow of other third-party logistics companies. These features are modeled through a preprocessing step. In this phase, a series of auxiliary sets are defined to simplify constraints, circulation options are mapped, and the double-track is divided into segments based on the transit time with the objective to control track occupation.

This preprocess step also reduces the model complexity and, consequently, the computational time to solve it, as shown in the numerical tests using real-world operational data.

The main gains of the project were a reference train timetable for peak days, standardization of train crossing options, and a support tool for traffic adjustments with other rail operators.