The spatial structure of the financial development in Brazil

This paper explores the financial development in Brazil. It focuses on the impacts of the development level of a municipality’s financial system over its neighborhood, under the light of the Central Place Theory. Using a GMM estimator for a spatial panel model with an endogenous spatial lag and spatial moving average errors we investigate the spatial structure of the financial system in Brazil. The results point to a negative spatial association between the Brazilian municipalities’ financial system, in the way that a municipality with more developed financial system tends to be surrounded by municipalities with less developed financial systems.financial development, spatial structure, bank strategy, Brazil

NLO electroweak corrections in general scalar singlet models

If no new physics signals are found, in the coming years, at the Large Hadron Collider Run-2, an increase in precision of the Higgs couplings measurements will shift the dicussion to the effects of higher order corrections. In Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) theories this may become the only tool to probe new physics. Extensions of the Standard Model (SM) with several scalar singlets may address several of its problems, namely to explain dark matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry, or to improve the stability of the SM up to the Planck scale. In this work we propose a general framework to calculate one loop-corrections in BSM models with an arbitrary number of scalar singlets. We then apply our method to a real and to a complex scalar singlet models. We assess the importance of the one-loop radiative corrections first by computing them for a tree level mixing sum constraint, and then for the main Higgs production process $gg \to H$. We conclude that, for the currently allowed parameter space of these models, the corrections can be at most a few percent. Notably, a non-zero correction can survive when dark matter is present, in the SM-like limit of the Higgs couplings to other SM particles.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figure

Forecasting Long-Term Government Bond Yields: An Application of Statistical and AI Models

This paper evaluates several artificial intelligence and classical algorithms on their ability of forecasting the monthly yield of the US 10-year Treasury bonds from a set of four economic indicators. Due to the complexity of the prediction problem, the task represents a challenging test for the algorithms under evaluation. At the same time, the study is of particular significance for the important and paradigmatic role played by the US market in the world economy. Four data-driven artificial intelligence approaches are considered, namely, a manually built fuzzy logic model, a machine learned fuzzy logic model, a self-organising map model and a multi-layer perceptron model. Their performance is compared with the performance of two classical approaches, namely, a statistical ARIMA model and an econometric error correction model. The algorithms are evaluated on a complete series of end-month US 10-year Treasury bonds yields and economic indicators from 1986:1 to 2004:12. In terms of prediction accuracy and reliability of the modelling procedure, the best results are obtained by the three parametric regression algorithms, namely the econometric, the statistical and the multi-layer perceptron model. Due to the sparseness of the learning data samples, the manual and the automatic fuzzy logic approaches fail to follow with adequate precision the range of variations of the US 10-year Treasury bonds. For similar reasons, the self-organising map model gives an unsatisfactory performance. Analysis of the results indicates that the econometric model has a slight edge over the statistical and the multi-layer perceptron models. This suggests that pure data-driven induction may not fully capture the complicated mechanisms ruling the changes in interest rates. Overall, the prediction accuracy of the best models is only marginally better than the prediction accuracy of a basic one-step lag predictor. This result highlights the difficulty of the modelling task and, in general, the difficulty of building reliable predictors for financial markets.interest rates; forecasting; neural networks; fuzzy logic.

A igreja de Nossa Senhora da Luz de Tavira

Dissertação de mest., História da Arte, Faculdade de Ciências Humanas e Sociais, Univ. do Algarve, 2011A igreja paroquial de Nossa Senhora da Luz de Tavira, um edifício de três naves, todas com a mesma altura, totalmente coberto por abóbada, é o único exemplar de igreja-salão existente na região do Algarve e, provavelmente, o mais antigo exemplar desta tipologia a ser edificado em Portugal no período pós-manuelino. Outrora um importante centro de romaria, a actual igreja terá sido construída em meados do século XVI, algures entre 1548 e 1568, possivelmente segundo um projecto da autoria de Miguel de Arruda, arquitecto ligado a outros projectos de igrejas-salão, que se sabe ter passado por Tavira no mesmo período. Na actual igreja existem ainda elementos arquitectónicos de fábrica manuelina, reaproveitados de uma construção anterior, alguns de grande qualidade artística, merecendo particular destaque o portal lateral manuelino, provavelmente o antigo portal axial da primitiva paroquial, construída aquando da instituição da freguesia, que se julga ter ocorrido nos primeiros anos do século XVI. O actual portal axial, de grande monumentalidade, é um original exemplar maneirista. A ornamentação interior é constituída por um interessante conjunto de imagens, retábulos e tábuas pintadas, quase todos datados dos séculos XVI e XVII

O mestre entalhador Manuel Romero. Um artista sevilhano em Tavira no início do século XIX

A actividade artística desenvolvida pelo mestre entalhador Manuel Romero na região algarvia foi, pela primeira vez, referenciada por Francisco Lameira, na sua dissertação de Doutoramento em História da Arte Moderna, intitulada A Talha no Algarve durante o Antigo Regime, dada à estampa no ano de 2000. Nesse ensaio, o referido entalhador, então designado como Manuel “Romeira”, é apontado como o autor dos retábulos colaterais da igreja da Ordem Terceira do Carmo de Tavira, executados entre 1817 e 1818, utilizando o formulário neoclássico, assim como o responsável pela execução da essa, isto é, do estrado onde se colocavam as urnas durante as cerimónias fúnebres, para a mesma igreja, em 1820. Para além, disso era ainda tido como o presumível autor de um outro retábulo, que apresenta semelhanças formais com os anteriores, existente no baptistério da igreja de Santa Maria do Castelo, igualmente em Tavira