Several authors have detected a paradigm shift in contemporary science: from a reductionist or mechanicist approach to a holistic or systemic one. This transition in paradigms should be perceptible in several disciplines, starting in biology and extending itself to others areas. In light of the...

This paper intends to contribute to the theoretical and methodological debate on regionalization and history. Firstly, it starts discussing the very concept of region on its several related approaches: geography, political economy, history and historiography. Then, a methodological issue is...

This paper investigates the impact of a conditional cash transfer on child nutritional status in Brazil. We use data from "Bolsa Família" Research Impact Evaluation. "Bolsa Família" is a conditional cash transfer program focused on Brazilian poor families. In order to evaluate the average...

Amidst the economists that are concerned about the method, it is common to make reference on the subject of a new economic methodology. It was from the deception and the abandon of the search toward a unique criterion to give scientific status to research programmes that this new movement came...

This paper investigates how the finances of the Brazilian federal government responded to innovations in the debts of the most indebted states, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul. Using monthly data from 1981 to 1998, a vector autoregression system (VAR) is estimated...

This paper analyzes the effects of changing age structure and family size on schooling in Brazil. Cohorts born before 1982 were born during a period of falling family size but increasing cohort size. We show that the growth of the school-aged population peaked around 1990, coinciding with the...

The paper’s purpose is to investigate and to criticize the quantitative method used by antitrust authorities to analyze mergers unilateral effects. Until the nineties the method used by antitrust authorities was discretionary, based on a structural analysis of the market or the relevant market...

We investigate the existence of national styles of political economy and suggest the characteristics and determinants of the German, Austrian, French, and English styles. Some methodological implications for the history economic thought are outlined.

The catharsis produced by the early 1620’s trade crisis had a significant impact on the way economic themes were regarded by public opinion in England. As a result, those who analyze the ideas put forward in the documents written during that period – be they printed pamphlets or...

This paper develops a theoretical model for parental behavior regarding land inheritance, explicitly accounting for consumption and human capital savings strategies. We distinguish two types of modeling: one with and another without strategic behavior. In the first model, we assume that children...