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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of left Brazilian political parties and partisan disruption on the homicide rate in Brazil.

The authors use panel data for the states between the years 1980 and 2011. The database used is an unbalanced panel covering a sample of 27 Brazilian states over 32 years, 1980-2011, totaling about 855 observations.

It is estimated that these two political factors are sources that have connection to the increased level of violence in Brazil. These analyses provide several important results. First, partisan disruption is associated with a higher homicide rate, compared to non-partisan disruption. The results from the panel also suggest that left-parties in government have a positive impact on homicide, compared to non-left-parties.

Information regarding premeditated homicides (CID-BR-9 database) is available for all Brazilian states, and may be tabulated from the same micro-data at any level of aggregation. Some of the well-known problems regarding the choice of this variable are as follows. First, deaths resulting from wounds are sometimes included in the statistics whether wounds were intentionally inflicted or not. In addition, some incidents end up not being registered because certain deaths are not reported. This tends to occur more frequently in rural areas. Fortunately, this second problem does not appear to be too significant, as under-registry of deaths due to external causes is much lower than the amount resulting from natural causes (see, e.g. Cano and Santos, 2000). In addition, this problem may be controlled if under-registry remains stable over time by applying fixed effects to the panel data.

The main Brazilian political parties diverge on the causes of crime and how criminals should be punished. For example, in Brazil, the minimum age for one individual to be punished with imprisonment is 18 years old. Practices crimes for young people between 12 and 18 implies only in socio-educational measures. Given the high level of violence in Brazil, there is a bill being debated in the parliament that proposes to reduce the age to 16 years. Based on the research, 90 percent of the population approves the reduction of age to 16 years. However, the majority of parliament is opposed to changing the law. In general, the more conservative parties are favorable to changing the law.

These divergent postures can be associated with the ideological essence or to belief system of each political party. Political parties have the potential capacity of changing crime trends through economic and social policies as well as by applying stronger sanctions against crime. Given the law enforcement system, the cycle of crime in Brazil may be related to the profile of the political party elected.

The authors assume the hypothesis that the current Brazilian multi-partisan system has an incentive system in which politicians do not respond adequately to the basic wishes of voters. Among such desires, the authors emphasize public safety. This paper evaluates the empirical effect of partisan disruption on homicide rate.

The article investigates the existence of discrimination in the urban and rural labor markets in Brazil. Tests the hypothesis that returns to education are different for black and white workers, male and female, in the urban and rural sectors. The methodology used allows for the decomposition of the difference in the mean earnings of male and female workers in the urban and rural sectors in a share that can be explained by characteristics such as education, hours of work and experience, and in another share that reflects the existence of discrimination. The analysis is carried out with microdata from the National Household Surveys (PNADs) of 1992 and 1998. The choice of the period of analysis was made with the aim of investigating whether changes in the economic environment affect the standard of returns to education. The results suggest the existence of strong discrimination by gender and race, besides the presence of substantial wage differentials between urban and rural workers.

This chapter discusses how young Black people produce social agency through the sphere of culture, based on hip-hop. Divided into two parts, it surveys theses and dissertations produced in Brazilian universities on the subject in the last ten years. In a second moment, it proposes a research methodology that takes young people as narrators of their social experiences, emphasizing how they think about the school space. The work is an exploratory study and seeks the interposition between formal schooling and the cultural practices of hip-hoppers. It intends to affirm hip-hop as a power, an affirmative form of an ethic of life, a way of life, and a way of escaping the established places for poor, Black young people from the suburbs. It is also intended to show how hip-hop, a marginal culture, has triggered a game of cultural positions within the school and displaced provisions of power.

The purpose of this study is to contribute with new insights into the nature, dimensionality and measurement of the core essence of the small city boutique hotel (SCBH), something which has been limited in the literature to date. It further explores the conceptual relationships of SCBH with other constructs, providing greater understanding of the nature of these specific conceptual associations and showing that the SCBH scale exhibits construct validity.

This study followed the Churchill’s paradigm to methodologically design the study and develop the scale. Based on an exploratory qualitative inquiry (one focus group and ten interviews) and quantitative assessment (two surveys), support was found for a three-dimensional scale.

Results support the proposed measures of the scale (dream, hospitality and style) in terms of construct, convergent, discriminate, nomological and predictive validity. The findings also suggest that while authenticity acts as a SCBH antecedent, pleasant arousal and preference represent SCBH consequences.

By developing and validating a SCBH scale for city destination, this study addresses an identified literature gap. Specifically, it conceptualizes SCBH as guests’ perception about core characteristics of SCBHs located in the city.

This study aims to investigate the association of demographic characteristics, market conditions and risk taking with the disposition effect using data on Brazilian individual investors.

This study uses a unique data set with monthly data from June 2007 to February 2017 provided by one of the largest asset management firms in Brazil. This paper computes the proportion of gains realized and the proportion of losses realized to see if investors incur the disposition effect. This paper then performs logistic regressions to verify the association between investors’ disposition effects and demographic and portfolio characteristics. This paper analyses the prevalence of cognitive biases depending on market conditions (bull or bear markets) and include regressions by asset class as robustness checks.

This paper finds evidence that risk averse investors are more prone to the disposition effect, male subjects are less prone to this cognitive bias and age is not associated with the disposition effect. This paper observes that the tendency to incur the disposition effect decreases during bull markets but increases during bear markets. Also, this paper finds that sophisticated investors are more prone to selling winning assets and holding on to losses.

First, paper gains and losses are based on the highest and lowest prices of the month and not on the price at the moment the sale occurred. Second, this paper had access only to end-of-month information, not to actual daily trading records. Third, because the data set relates to individual investors who trade investment funds, this paper cannot determine whether firm size is associated with the disposition effect. Fourth, age may not necessarily be a proxy for investor experience, so one should interpret the lack of significance for age in terms of generational differences.

This paper demonstrates that the disposition effect is prevalent even among wealthier and more educated investors with delegated asset classes. This paper also presents evidence on the association between demographic characteristics and cognitive biases considering a liquidity-constrained, highly volatile and developing market.

This paper demonstrates that gender is an important characteristic to understand cognitive biases and that investor sophistication may not necessarily be an attenuation factor for the disposition effect in a liquidity-constrained market.

This is the first study to analyse the role of demographic characteristics and risk taking to explain the disposition effect using real information at the individual level about Brazilian investors. It is also the first to analyse the intensity of cognitive biases during bull and bear markets in the Brazilian economy.

This paper aims to investigate Lean Six Sigma (LSS) in the Brazilian context, seeking to identify its main characteristics and opportunities for future research.

This study focuses on a literature review in the area of production engineering and operations management, where 104 relevant scientific publications were identified.

The results show that the most important critical success factor for integrating LSS in Brazil is top management support and commitment. LSS integration occurs predominantly in large industrial companies, being incipient in small and medium-sized enterprises. In general, there is no structured way of applying LSS. A standard framework for LSS is still lacking.

This study is limited to a sample that only comprises Brazilian scientific studies.

Professionals and practitioners can understand the evolution of LSS through practical applications and the main LSS tools used in both the industrial and services sectors. It also points out the critical success factor for the implementation of LSS. The study highlights several roadmaps for LSS implementation adopted by large and modern Brazilian automotive industries based on a robust technological base. This study also contributes to expanding the evidence base of LSS application, both in Brazil and in other countries.

Some suggestions are proposed to clarify the structure and complexity of integrated implementation of LP and SS as well as expand the LSS application in small and medium-sized enterprises. This study is the first to discuss the current situation of LSS in Brazil and provide suggestions to expand LSS in the country. Comparisons of Brazilian LSS literature review with researches of others countries are also presented.

Manufacturing companies worldwide have been replacing traditional mass-production practices by lean initiatives. This translation process is progressive and may vary depending on several factors. Hence, it could be expected that the degree of adoption of the lean practices could vary significantly among industries, regions and even countries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the implementation performance of lean principles in Brazil, the paper developed a survey in the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Area, which considered 51 industries of different sizes, from several industrial segments, nationals and multinationals.

The proposed survey was developed using as a normative framework the SAE J4000 standard – identification and measurement of the best practice in implementation of lean operation and the SAE J4001 – implementation of lean operation user manual. To measure the implementation degree of the lean practices in the researched industries, the paper proposed the utilization of two concepts: the degree of leanness (DOL) of an element of J4000 and DOL of a company. Also three hypotheses were tested, trying to establish the relationship among the DOL and firm ownership, their size and respective industrial sector.

The results obtained in the survey demonstrated that the performance of lean initiative implementation is not uniform among the companies located in the researched area. Outcomes also showed that the degree of implementation of the lean practices by multinational companies was higher than that for the national firms. However, it was not possible to establish a relationship between the DOL and the size of the firms. Neither a clear and definite association between DOL and industrial sector was possible to be identified.

For the practitioners and managers dealing with the lean implementation, this paper gives a relevant contribution because it shows how they can effectively use an existing tool to measure the implementation of the lean practices in their respective firms. Furthermore, the DOL calculation for each individual element of the J4000 standard could also be used by practitioners and managers to identify specific problems and opportunity areas where practical actions could be identified to improve the lean implementation.

This paper contributes to the lean manufacturing theory because it proposes a theoretical way to measure the degree of implementation of the lean initiatives in the manufacturing companies. Also the survey results generate additional research material that could be used by other researchers to further explore the subject in the area.

This chapter provides an overview of local government auditing in Brazil. The mandate of regional Courts of Accounts, which are public audit organisations, includes overseeing states and municipalities’ legal compliance and public policy performance, while the federal Supreme Audit Institution scrutinises fiscal transfers from the central to local governments. Each of the 32 regional Courts of Accounts is autonomous. However, all follow the Napoleonic audit model and are internally organised in three main functions: auditing (comprising investigation, fair hearing and adversarial phase, and accusation), prosecuting (comprising legal compliance analysis), and judgmental. Despite the comprehensive legal mandate and recent digitalisation efforts, Courts still focus on compliance audit. Due to their autonomy, the Courts lack central coordination, standardised audit techniques, and uniform procedural rules. Moreover, the Courts’ lack of independence and transparency may impair their capacity to promote democratic accountability.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a subjective multidimensional measure of early career success during university-to-work transition.

The construct of university-to-work success (UWS) was defined in terms of intrinsic and extrinsic career outcomes, and a three-stage study was conducted to create a new scale.

A preliminary set of items was developed and tested by judges. Results showed the items had good content validity. Factor analyses indicated a four-factor structure and a second-order model with subscales to assess: career insertion and satisfaction, confidence in career future, income and financial independence, and adaptation to work. Third, the authors sought to confirm the hypothesized model examining the comparative fit of the scale and two alternative models. Results showed that fits for both the first- and second-order models were acceptable.

The proposed model has sound psychometric qualities, although the validated version of the scale was not able to incorporate all constructs envisaged by the initial theoretical model. Results indicated some direction for further refinement.

The scale could be used as a tool for self-assessment or as an outcome measure to assess the efficacy of university-to-work programs in applied settings.

This study provides a useful single measure to assess early career success during the university-to-work transition, and might facilitate testing of causal models which could help identify factors relevant for successful transition.