Fonte: Aqui (dica de Claudio Santana, grato)
Mostrando postagens com marcador Beatles. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Beatles. Mostrar todas as postagens
12 maio 2020
Contabilidade e o Fim dos Beatles
Fonte: Aqui (dica de Claudio Santana, grato)
13 dezembro 2019
John ou Paul?
Conclusão
Paul foi o melhor Beatle. Simplesmente não há um vencedor claro, mas se pressionado, eu diria que essa análise mostra Paul como o compositor um pouco melhor. Uma coisa que pode ser dita com segurança é que John não era a única força motriz artística por trás dos Beatles
O autor usou Streaming (Paulo é mais popular, pois as 10 músicas mais escutadas, 5 são de Paul, 2 dos dois, 2 de John e 1 George) e sua própria análise das músicas dos Beatles.
05 dezembro 2017
Rir é o melhor remédio
Beatles para a geração atual:
“Drive My Google Car”
“Ticket to ‘Hamilton’ ”
“ 👩 😍 U, 👍 👍 👍 ”
“She’s Leaving Home to Go Backpacking for a Semester”
“In My Wife!”
“Do You Want to Know a Secret? Click Here”
“I Am the Wall Street Lobbyist”
“While My Video Slowly Buffers”
“Honestly? Honey Don’t”
“And Your Bird Can Oppa Gangnam Style”
“Flying (I’m On Molly) ”
“A Day in My Wife!”
“Lucy Stuntin’ on the Jumbotron with Blood Diamonds”
“Here, There, Yeah, They Love Me Everywhere”
“Ph.D. Candidate Robert”
“Hey My Dude!”
“Lady Madonna? We’re Feuding”
“I Want to Hold Your Phone”
“Her Majesty’s Instagram”
“Help!!! I’m Unskilled”
“With a Little Help from Chandler, Joey, Phoebe, Monica, Ross, and Rachel”
“Don’t Bother Me (Until I’ve Had My Covfefe)”
“Here Comes Global Warming”
“Run for Your Life to Canada”
“Angry Birds Slinging in the Dead of Night”
“Got to Get You into My Wife!”
“Yesterday” (This is a timeless classic.)
“Drive My Google Car”
“Ticket to ‘Hamilton’ ”
“ 👩 😍 U, 👍 👍 👍 ”
“She’s Leaving Home to Go Backpacking for a Semester”
“In My Wife!”
“Do You Want to Know a Secret? Click Here”
“I Am the Wall Street Lobbyist”
“While My Video Slowly Buffers”
“Honestly? Honey Don’t”
“And Your Bird Can Oppa Gangnam Style”
“Flying (I’m On Molly) ”
“A Day in My Wife!”
“Lucy Stuntin’ on the Jumbotron with Blood Diamonds”
“Here, There, Yeah, They Love Me Everywhere”
“Ph.D. Candidate Robert”
“Hey My Dude!”
“Lady Madonna? We’re Feuding”
“I Want to Hold Your Phone”
“Her Majesty’s Instagram”
“Help!!! I’m Unskilled”
“With a Little Help from Chandler, Joey, Phoebe, Monica, Ross, and Rachel”
“Don’t Bother Me (Until I’ve Had My Covfefe)”
“Here Comes Global Warming”
“Run for Your Life to Canada”
“Angry Birds Slinging in the Dead of Night”
“Got to Get You into My Wife!”
“Yesterday” (This is a timeless classic.)
20 novembro 2017
27 outubro 2017
Links
Dez meses depois, ações do Monte Dei Paschi voltam ao pregão
Um fundo "adquiriu" um processo judicial contra Toshiba
Prêmio pelo risco no Brasil (via blog Contabilidade e Métodos Quantitativos)
Bancos e incentivos inapropriados
A popularidade dos Beatles está diminuindo?
21 agosto 2017
17 novembro 2015
30 julho 2014
Resenha: Man on the Run
No final dos anos sessenta, o maior grupo musical que já existiu estava acabado. As brigas internas romperam a antiga amizade que unia John, Paul, George e Ringo. Enquanto George tentava buscar na religião a infelicidade trazida pela fama e John unia-se a Yoko para fazer política, Paul tentava manter o grupo através de trabalho. E Ringo sempre foi o lado mais fraco da criatividade musical dos Beatles.
Até hoje se discute o que levou o maior sucesso da música optarem pela separação. Alguns acham que foi Yoko; outros, as tentativas forçadas de Paul; há ainda aqueles, como Tom Doyle, autor de Man on the Run, que consideram que o novo manager da banda, Klein, foi a principal razão para o fim da banda. Mas o livro da resenha da semana não é sobre os Beatles; é sobre o que aconteceu com Paul após o fim da banda. Inicialmente, Paul tentou fugir da responsabilidade de ser um ex-beatle com a bebida; depois, brigou com a banda, inclusive na justiça; e finalmente, conseguiu fazer uma brilhante carreira musical sem os seus antigos companheiros.
Man on the Run conta em 15 capítulos os dez anos seguintes ao fim da banda para McCartney. O contato, mais frequente do que eu imaginava, com Lennon; a criação de clássicos como Mull of Kintyre, Coming up, My Love, Jet, Let Me Roll It ou Live and Let Die; a tentativa de buscar substitutos na formação do Wings, os problemas com as drogas, a prisão no Japão, a criação dos filhos na Escócia e muitos outros assuntos. O livro conta que McCartney era péssimo em finanças e perdeu muito dinheiro, antes e depois dos Beatles, por confiar nas pessoas ou por ser perdulário. Mesmo jogando dinheiro fora, McCartney possui hoje uma fortuna perto de US$ 1 bilhão.
Vale a pena? Para quem gosta dos Beatles a obra conta boas histórias. É um livro simpático a Paul e geralmente todo fã da banda possui suas preferências. Trata-se de uma leitura bem agradável, mas pule a chata introdução. Para quem não gosta, esqueça.
. São Paulo: Leya, 2014.Se decidir comprar o livro, sugerimos escolher um de nossos parceiros. O blog é afiliado aos seguintes programas:
Amazon Brasil
Americanas
Submarino
ShopTime
SouBarato.com.br-
08 novembro 2013
Beatles
O vídeo é um pouco longo, mas mostra o "clipe" com desenho animado da música Taxman:
Sobre esta música, veja também duas postagens anteriores: a relação entre música e contabilidade e uma propaganda com esta música.
Sobre esta música, veja também duas postagens anteriores: a relação entre música e contabilidade e uma propaganda com esta música.
09 agosto 2013
Abbey Road
Há 44 anos foi tirada a foto dos Beatles atravessando Abbey Road. Aqui uma câmera ao vivo da rua.
15 junho 2013
Como estudar sozinho em casa
Dicas rápidas e simples que sairam na Superinteressante. Dica de Rafael Bevilaqua, a quem agradecemos.
(Clique na imagem para ampliá-la).
(Clique na imagem para ampliá-la).
20 abril 2013
Kakenya Ntaiya: Uma menina que exigiu a escola
Kakenya Ntaiya fez um acordo com seu pai: Ela se submeteria ao tradicional rito de passagem Maassai, a circuncisão feminina, se ele a deixasse frequentar o ensino médio. Ntaiya conta sua corajosa história até chegar à faculdade, e seu trabalho junto aos mais velhos de sua vila, para construir uma escola para meninas na comunidade. É a jornada educacional de alguém que mudou o destino de 125 jovens mulheres. (Filmado no TEDxMidAtlantic.)
05 abril 2013
10 dicas para identificar o plágio
Além dos programas de caçam plágio, um leitor poderá desconfiar que um texto seja plagiado a partir de algumas dicas. Apresento, a seguir, uma lista incompleta de alguns dos indícios:
1. O nível do texto é superior à capacidade do autor – Isto pode ocorrer quando você conhece quem escreveu o texto. Se o trabalho que você estiver lendo tiver uma qualidade muito acima do que você esperaria daquela pessoa, isto pode ser um sinal de plágio;
2. O texto mudou de estilo e de qualidade – O texto segue um estilo normal e, de repente torna-se muito técnico. O novo trecho tem grande chance de ter sido copiado de alguém. Outra situação próxima a esta é a mudança brusca de assunto.
3. A análise dos dados para num ano sem uma explicação plausível – Li um artigo este ano em que os autores fizeram uma análise de algumas demonstrações financeiras no ano de 2010. Não existia nenhuma razão de fazer a análise para 2010 se existiam informações disponíveis de 2011.
4. Citações difíceis de serem obtidas – Existem algumas obras que dificilmente as pessoas conseguem acesso, como artigos antigos e livros com edições esgotadas.
5. Não existe vínculo entre as partes – Alguns textos parecem Frankenstein: as partes não estão interligadas, a análise de dados não tem uma coerência com o referencial teórico e assim por diante.
6. Citações defasadas – Quando não existe nenhuma obra recente sobre o assunto no trabalho: isto pode ser um sinal de que o autor buscou em terceiros sua citação.
7. Tradução em citações literais – Alguns textos possuem citações literais de obras em outras línguas. Em geral que faz ele próprio a tradução, informa que a tradução é própria.
8. Tema pouco usual na literatura acadêmica brasileira – Há meses fui convidado a avaliar um artigo encaminhado para um periódico nacional. O assunto era pouco usual na nossa literatura, assim como a abordagem usada – baseada excessivamente em modelagem. O texto era uma tradução de um artigo publicado em língua inglesa.
9. Gráficos com baixa resolução – Se no trabalho aparecer uma figura, um gráfico, uma tabela ou fórmula com baixa resolução visual desconfie. Pode ter sido usado o Control C + Control V.
10. A formatação difere das regras pré-estabelecidas – Eis um caso típico: foi solicitado expressamente para usar as normas da ABNT na citação e o texto traz citações pelas normas da APA. Qual a razão para o autor desobedecer as normas?
1. O nível do texto é superior à capacidade do autor – Isto pode ocorrer quando você conhece quem escreveu o texto. Se o trabalho que você estiver lendo tiver uma qualidade muito acima do que você esperaria daquela pessoa, isto pode ser um sinal de plágio;
2. O texto mudou de estilo e de qualidade – O texto segue um estilo normal e, de repente torna-se muito técnico. O novo trecho tem grande chance de ter sido copiado de alguém. Outra situação próxima a esta é a mudança brusca de assunto.
3. A análise dos dados para num ano sem uma explicação plausível – Li um artigo este ano em que os autores fizeram uma análise de algumas demonstrações financeiras no ano de 2010. Não existia nenhuma razão de fazer a análise para 2010 se existiam informações disponíveis de 2011.
4. Citações difíceis de serem obtidas – Existem algumas obras que dificilmente as pessoas conseguem acesso, como artigos antigos e livros com edições esgotadas.
5. Não existe vínculo entre as partes – Alguns textos parecem Frankenstein: as partes não estão interligadas, a análise de dados não tem uma coerência com o referencial teórico e assim por diante.
6. Citações defasadas – Quando não existe nenhuma obra recente sobre o assunto no trabalho: isto pode ser um sinal de que o autor buscou em terceiros sua citação.
7. Tradução em citações literais – Alguns textos possuem citações literais de obras em outras línguas. Em geral que faz ele próprio a tradução, informa que a tradução é própria.
8. Tema pouco usual na literatura acadêmica brasileira – Há meses fui convidado a avaliar um artigo encaminhado para um periódico nacional. O assunto era pouco usual na nossa literatura, assim como a abordagem usada – baseada excessivamente em modelagem. O texto era uma tradução de um artigo publicado em língua inglesa.
9. Gráficos com baixa resolução – Se no trabalho aparecer uma figura, um gráfico, uma tabela ou fórmula com baixa resolução visual desconfie. Pode ter sido usado o Control C + Control V.
10. A formatação difere das regras pré-estabelecidas – Eis um caso típico: foi solicitado expressamente para usar as normas da ABNT na citação e o texto traz citações pelas normas da APA. Qual a razão para o autor desobedecer as normas?
14 novembro 2012
Música e Contabilidade
As artes expressam de certa maneira o sentimento das pessoas comuns. Se a sociedade considera uma profissão positiva, isto deverá estar expresso nos filmes, nas músicas, nas peças de teatro e nos romances. No passado, pesquisas foram feitas verificando como o contador aparecia em filmes, por exemplo.
Dois pesquisadores australianos resolveram investigar como a contabilidade e os contadores apareciam nas letras das músicas. Talvez a mais famosa música relacionada com a contabilidade seja Taxman, de George Harrison, para o álbum Revolver dos Beatles, que protestava contra a grande quantidade de impostos que ele pagava. Ou seja, não é uma imagem muito positiva da contabilidade.
As outras músicas investigadas mostram que a contabilidade – e o contador – é apresentada de maneira negativa: seja como servo do capitalismo ou como opressor ou associado a um escândalo. Este seria o estereotipo que a música passa sobre este assunto. Para os autores, ao contrário da imagem de algo “chato”, a visão das letras é que contabilidade é algo do “mal”.
A pesquisa foi realizada em língua inglesa. Em português não conhecia nenhuma letra que tivesse os dois termos até escrever este artigo. O mais próximo seria uma letra do Ópera do Malandro, de Chico Buarque. Mas pesquisando sobre o assunto encontrei a música Pra se sentir melhor , de LS Jack, com a seguinte letra:
Mas as pessoas não precisam ter ilusões
Pra se sentir melhor
Pra dentista é muito candidato
História não dá status
Contabilidade não dá prestígio
Para ler mais: SMITH, David; JACOBS, Kerry. “Breaking up the Sky” The characterisation of accounting and accountants in popular music. Accounting, auditing & Accountability Journal. V. 24. N. 7, 2011, p. 904-931.
16 junho 2012
30 março 2012
Entrevista com Daron Acemoglu
De acordo com Ideas/Repec, Daron Acemoglu, economista turco e professor do MIT, está entre os 10 economistas mais citados do mundo e, em 2005, foi premiado com o prêmio John Bates Clark Medal. Atua nas áreas de crescimento e desenvolvimento econômico, desigualdade de renda e capital humano. Sua fama está relacionada aos trabalhos que realiza acerca do impacto do ambiente político sobre o crescimento econômico.
Na última semana, juntamente com James Robinson lançou o livro Why Nations Fail:The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. A principal tese do livro é que o sistema político e suas instituições são a chave para o crescimento e desenvolvimento econômico e explicam as diferenças de renda entre as nações. Países que têm o que eles chamam de sistema político "inclusivo" - aqueles que estendem os direitos políticos e de propriedade tão amplamente quanto possível e, ao mesmo tempo, fazem cumprir as leis e fornecem alguma infra-estrutura pública - experimentam maior crescimento no longo prazo. Por outro lado, Acemoglu e Robinson afirmam que os países com sistema político "extrativista" - em que o poder é exercido por uma pequena elite - ou não conseguem crescer de forma ampla ou definham após curtos períodos de expansão econômica.
Segundo Acemoglu, o crescimento econômico depende de inovação tecnológica generalizada. Mas, a inovação somente se sustenta nos países em que promovem os direitos políticos e de propriedade, dando às pessoas mais incentivo para inventar coisas..O NYT publicou uma resenha otimista sobre o trabalho, enquanto a The Economist fez algumas criticas negativas sobre a tese do livro. Porém, a resenha mais interessante é de Francis Fukuyama.
Na entrevista abaixo, Acemoglu fala de desigualdade de renda e comenta sobre cinco livros que tratam do tema. Eis alguns trechos interessantes:
Inequality is in the news a lot right now. How should we be thinking about it and trying to get our heads around it?
Inequality is one of the things that has changed quite a lot in the United States and other economies over the last three decades or so. A lot of things don’t change radically, but inequality has. Understanding why that has happened and what it implies for our society is important. So it’s a good thing that it’s in the news, it’s an important topic and there is no reason for it to be taboo. Having said that, there is no broad consensus among social scientists about how to talk about inequality, and the average economist probably thinks about it very differently than the average layman. I’m not saying one is right and one is wrong, but the conversation needs to be expanded to bring these different viewpoints to the table.
What’s the economist’s view?
The default position of economists is that inequality reflects the unequal human capital or productive capabilities of different workers. If you start with that premise – that what people earn is commensurate with their contribution to their employer, and also perhaps to society – then greater inequality tells you something about how people’s productivities have evolved over time...We’ve seen a big increase in inequality, measured in various ways, and this reflects the fact that the top people, the more educated, high earners have become more skilled. Technology has favoured them, globalisation has favoured them, and inequality has increased for that reason.
Let’s go through your books. Your first choice is The Race between Education and Technology, published by Harvard University Press. You mentioned in an earlier email to me that it is “a must-read for anyone interested in inequality”. Tell me more.
Acemoglu: It highlights in a very clear manner what determines the productivities of different individuals and different groups. It takes its cue from a phrase that the famous Dutch economist, Jan Tinbergen coined. The key idea is that technological changes often increase the demand for more skilled workers, so in order to keep inequality in check you need to have a steady increase in the supply of skilled workers in the economy. He called this “the race between education and technology”. If the race is won by technology, inequality tends to increase, if the race is won by education, inequality tends to decrease.
One is that technology has become even more biased towards more skilled, higher earning workers than before. So, all else being equal, that will tend to increase inequality. Secondly, we’ve been going through a phase of globalisation. Things such as trading with China – where low-skill labour is much cheaper – are putting pressure on low wages. Third, and possibly most important, is that the US education system has been failing terribly at some level. We haven’t been able to increase the share of our youth that completes college or high school. It’s really remarkable, and most people wouldn’t actually guess this, but in the US, the cohorts that had the highest high-school graduation rates were the ones that were graduating in the middle of the 1960s. Our high-school graduation rate has actually been declining since then. If you look at college, it’s the same thing. This is hugely important, and it’s really quite shocking. It has a major effect on inequality, because it is making skills much more scarce then they should be.
One of the things they point out is that top income shares in the US and the UK started to increase during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Isn’t rising inequality just the result of Reagan and Thatcher reducing taxes on the rich?
I personally don’t think that’s the main thing, though it certainly played a role. It played a role for capital income. When you look at the top 0.1%, many of them are capital earners. So if you tax capital heavily, then the rich are not going to have as much capital left and capital income is not going to be as unequally distributed. There is a very mechanical effect from taxation there. But there are two other, more subtle, effects from taxation. One is that more progressive taxation – higher taxes at the top – may discourage people from working very hard and putting in effort. That will reduce their earnings and thus inequality. That may be inefficient, but it’s one of the things that happen when you have high taxes. Secondly, it might change the way in which people bargain with their companies and engage in “rent-seeking” activities in order to increase their pay or their bonuses. In the extreme – and I don’t think this contributes a lot, but just to illustrate – if top incomes were taxed at 99%, then no CEO would be tempted to do semi-illegal things in order to increase his pay, because there would be nothing to gain from doing so. If the top tax rate is 30%, on the other hand, and CEOs get pay from options, they may be tempted to do things like the Enron CEO, Kenneth Lay, did, because they get a lot of money in return. So while high tax rates at the top may inefficiently reduce these people’s labour supply, it may also reduce their rent-seeking activities.
OK, so to get more of a sense of your own view, let’s talk about your book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty.
In terms of understanding this top inequality, I mentioned the possibility that it might be about politics. How should we think about politics? What are the levers of politics? For that we need a conceptual framework and that’s what this book tries to provide. It’s co-authored with my long-term collaborator and friend Jim Robinson – and it’s not about US or UK or Canadian inequality. It runs through several thousand years of history, and tries to explain how societies work and why, often, they fail to generate prosperity for their citizens. It’s a very political story.
...The absolutist institutions created a very unequal distribution of political power and a very unequal distribution of economic gains in society and the two became synergistic – the very unequal distribution of political power locked in a very unequal distribution of economics gains. This created a vicious circle, but the conflict it engendered sometimes led to a breaking down of the institutions that this unequal distribution depended on, opening the way for more open institutions, which are one of the engines of prosperity.
Na última semana, juntamente com James Robinson lançou o livro Why Nations Fail:The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. A principal tese do livro é que o sistema político e suas instituições são a chave para o crescimento e desenvolvimento econômico e explicam as diferenças de renda entre as nações. Países que têm o que eles chamam de sistema político "inclusivo" - aqueles que estendem os direitos políticos e de propriedade tão amplamente quanto possível e, ao mesmo tempo, fazem cumprir as leis e fornecem alguma infra-estrutura pública - experimentam maior crescimento no longo prazo. Por outro lado, Acemoglu e Robinson afirmam que os países com sistema político "extrativista" - em que o poder é exercido por uma pequena elite - ou não conseguem crescer de forma ampla ou definham após curtos períodos de expansão econômica.
Segundo Acemoglu, o crescimento econômico depende de inovação tecnológica generalizada. Mas, a inovação somente se sustenta nos países em que promovem os direitos políticos e de propriedade, dando às pessoas mais incentivo para inventar coisas..O NYT publicou uma resenha otimista sobre o trabalho, enquanto a The Economist fez algumas criticas negativas sobre a tese do livro. Porém, a resenha mais interessante é de Francis Fukuyama.
Na entrevista abaixo, Acemoglu fala de desigualdade de renda e comenta sobre cinco livros que tratam do tema. Eis alguns trechos interessantes:
Inequality is in the news a lot right now. How should we be thinking about it and trying to get our heads around it?
Inequality is one of the things that has changed quite a lot in the United States and other economies over the last three decades or so. A lot of things don’t change radically, but inequality has. Understanding why that has happened and what it implies for our society is important. So it’s a good thing that it’s in the news, it’s an important topic and there is no reason for it to be taboo. Having said that, there is no broad consensus among social scientists about how to talk about inequality, and the average economist probably thinks about it very differently than the average layman. I’m not saying one is right and one is wrong, but the conversation needs to be expanded to bring these different viewpoints to the table.
What’s the economist’s view?
The default position of economists is that inequality reflects the unequal human capital or productive capabilities of different workers. If you start with that premise – that what people earn is commensurate with their contribution to their employer, and also perhaps to society – then greater inequality tells you something about how people’s productivities have evolved over time...We’ve seen a big increase in inequality, measured in various ways, and this reflects the fact that the top people, the more educated, high earners have become more skilled. Technology has favoured them, globalisation has favoured them, and inequality has increased for that reason.
Let’s go through your books. Your first choice is The Race between Education and Technology, published by Harvard University Press. You mentioned in an earlier email to me that it is “a must-read for anyone interested in inequality”. Tell me more.
Acemoglu: It highlights in a very clear manner what determines the productivities of different individuals and different groups. It takes its cue from a phrase that the famous Dutch economist, Jan Tinbergen coined. The key idea is that technological changes often increase the demand for more skilled workers, so in order to keep inequality in check you need to have a steady increase in the supply of skilled workers in the economy. He called this “the race between education and technology”. If the race is won by technology, inequality tends to increase, if the race is won by education, inequality tends to decrease.
One is that technology has become even more biased towards more skilled, higher earning workers than before. So, all else being equal, that will tend to increase inequality. Secondly, we’ve been going through a phase of globalisation. Things such as trading with China – where low-skill labour is much cheaper – are putting pressure on low wages. Third, and possibly most important, is that the US education system has been failing terribly at some level. We haven’t been able to increase the share of our youth that completes college or high school. It’s really remarkable, and most people wouldn’t actually guess this, but in the US, the cohorts that had the highest high-school graduation rates were the ones that were graduating in the middle of the 1960s. Our high-school graduation rate has actually been declining since then. If you look at college, it’s the same thing. This is hugely important, and it’s really quite shocking. It has a major effect on inequality, because it is making skills much more scarce then they should be.
One of the things they point out is that top income shares in the US and the UK started to increase during the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Isn’t rising inequality just the result of Reagan and Thatcher reducing taxes on the rich?
I personally don’t think that’s the main thing, though it certainly played a role. It played a role for capital income. When you look at the top 0.1%, many of them are capital earners. So if you tax capital heavily, then the rich are not going to have as much capital left and capital income is not going to be as unequally distributed. There is a very mechanical effect from taxation there. But there are two other, more subtle, effects from taxation. One is that more progressive taxation – higher taxes at the top – may discourage people from working very hard and putting in effort. That will reduce their earnings and thus inequality. That may be inefficient, but it’s one of the things that happen when you have high taxes. Secondly, it might change the way in which people bargain with their companies and engage in “rent-seeking” activities in order to increase their pay or their bonuses. In the extreme – and I don’t think this contributes a lot, but just to illustrate – if top incomes were taxed at 99%, then no CEO would be tempted to do semi-illegal things in order to increase his pay, because there would be nothing to gain from doing so. If the top tax rate is 30%, on the other hand, and CEOs get pay from options, they may be tempted to do things like the Enron CEO, Kenneth Lay, did, because they get a lot of money in return. So while high tax rates at the top may inefficiently reduce these people’s labour supply, it may also reduce their rent-seeking activities.
OK, so to get more of a sense of your own view, let’s talk about your book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty.
In terms of understanding this top inequality, I mentioned the possibility that it might be about politics. How should we think about politics? What are the levers of politics? For that we need a conceptual framework and that’s what this book tries to provide. It’s co-authored with my long-term collaborator and friend Jim Robinson – and it’s not about US or UK or Canadian inequality. It runs through several thousand years of history, and tries to explain how societies work and why, often, they fail to generate prosperity for their citizens. It’s a very political story.
...The absolutist institutions created a very unequal distribution of political power and a very unequal distribution of economic gains in society and the two became synergistic – the very unequal distribution of political power locked in a very unequal distribution of economics gains. This created a vicious circle, but the conflict it engendered sometimes led to a breaking down of the institutions that this unequal distribution depended on, opening the way for more open institutions, which are one of the engines of prosperity.
28 março 2012
Entrevista com Byron Reeves
Byron Reeves, professor da Universidade de Stanford,é especialista na estudo da influência dos jogos sobre o comportamento dos profissionais. É autor de mais de 100 artigos sobre mídia e psicologia.Além disso, é co-fundador do H-Star Institute, centro de pesquisa, que estuda a relação das pessoas e da tecnologia.Na entrevista, ele trata da influência dos jogos no comportamento dos profissionais dentro das corporações:
Valor: Como os videogames influenciam a maneira como as pessoas trabalham?
Byron Reeves: Há 17 anos estou tentando entender de que forma o entretenimento e os jogos estão mudando as relações profissionais. É possível extrair ingredientes muito interessantes dos jogos que podem ser identificados em certos comportamentos no ambiente de trabalho. As evidências que temos é que eles deixam as pessoas mais engajadas. Muitas das tarefas que as pessoas realizam hoje são pesadas e repetitivas. Por isso, é difícil para elas enxergarem um propósito maior naquilo que estão fazendo. Os jogos incentivam a produtividade, no sentido de que neles as pessoas sabem exatamente de que forma estão contribuindo para o todo, para a realização de um objetivo maior.
Valor: A cultura dos jogos tende a acirrar a competitividade entre os profissionais?
Reeves: Essa nova geração de pessoas que jogam videogame está muito familiarizada com a competição. No entanto, ela acontece de uma maneira menos séria do que as gerações anteriores conheceram. A grande velocidade dos jogos faz com que as pessoas se adaptem mais facilmente a novas disputas. Muitos dos jogos, inclusive, envolvem times, então a competição não é apenas entre indivíduos. Você colabora com uma equipe e compete com outra. São movimentos importantes para a nova dinâmica dos negócios. Hoje, os jogos são a maior forma de entretenimento que existe, especialmente nos Estados Unidos. São produtos que as pessoas chegam a usar 40 horas por semana e a idade média dos jogadores é de 35 anos. É algo que todo mundo está fazendo ou se familiarizando.
Valor: É possível transferir o entusiasmo e a concentração que as pessoas têm quando jogam em casa para o ambiente de trabalho?
Reeves: Sim, é muito importante captar essa energia. Esse caminho é fundamental para a tecnologia interativa nos negócios. Muitas vezes, as companhias desenvolvem ferramentas poderosas onde todos estão conectados, mas que não são divertidas. Geralmente, as pessoas se perguntam porque não podem ter no trabalho coisas mais parecidas com as que usam em casa.
Valor: É também um treino de estratégia para os líderes?
Reeves: Toda a ação nos videogames é estratégica. Mas uma coisa interessante é que ela envolve sempre tentativa e erro. No jogo, você não marca um encontro para o próximo mês a fim de pensar em como vai agir. Não é assim que funciona.
Valor: Existe um espaço maior para erros?
Reeves: Nos jogos, o fracasso é esperado e é bom, pois é possível aprender com ele. Quando se tem uma ideia, ela é colocada em prática imediatamente. Caso não funcione, você pensa em outra ação e, assim, experimenta alternativas rapidamente.
Valor: Precisar repetir muitas vezes um movimento até descobrir como passar para uma nova fase ajuda a pessoa a ser mais paciente? Isso funciona no trabalho?
Reeves: No jogo você tenta, tenta e tenta de novo. Uma característica dos videogames difícil de se conseguir no mundo corporativo é que neles você tem um feedback instantâneo e permanente. No trabalho, o retorno sobre o que você faz pode aparecer só no fim do trimestre, do semestre ou do ano.
Valor: Como os videogames podem ajudar as organizações a conquistar novos mercados e a vencer competidores?
Reeves: Engajando seus empregados. Imagine que seu trabalho se passa dentro de um jogo. Você faz parte de um time, recebe pontos e reconhecimento sobre todos os aspectos da sua atuação e sabe como as coisas estão indo. O mais interessante, porém, é que você se envolve na história da companhia. Mesmo em grandes organizações com cem mil funcionários, até a menor contribuição tem valor. No jogo, é possível saber claramente qual é a minha responsabilidade e a minha participação no sucesso do todo. Sei exatamente o que eu fiz para que as coisas funcionassem e sou reconhecido por isso. Sinto-me, dessa maneira, parte da história. Isso é algo extremamente valioso e que as organizações deveriam usar em seu favor.
Valor: Como os videogames influenciam a maneira como as pessoas trabalham?
Byron Reeves: Há 17 anos estou tentando entender de que forma o entretenimento e os jogos estão mudando as relações profissionais. É possível extrair ingredientes muito interessantes dos jogos que podem ser identificados em certos comportamentos no ambiente de trabalho. As evidências que temos é que eles deixam as pessoas mais engajadas. Muitas das tarefas que as pessoas realizam hoje são pesadas e repetitivas. Por isso, é difícil para elas enxergarem um propósito maior naquilo que estão fazendo. Os jogos incentivam a produtividade, no sentido de que neles as pessoas sabem exatamente de que forma estão contribuindo para o todo, para a realização de um objetivo maior.
Valor: A cultura dos jogos tende a acirrar a competitividade entre os profissionais?
Reeves: Essa nova geração de pessoas que jogam videogame está muito familiarizada com a competição. No entanto, ela acontece de uma maneira menos séria do que as gerações anteriores conheceram. A grande velocidade dos jogos faz com que as pessoas se adaptem mais facilmente a novas disputas. Muitos dos jogos, inclusive, envolvem times, então a competição não é apenas entre indivíduos. Você colabora com uma equipe e compete com outra. São movimentos importantes para a nova dinâmica dos negócios. Hoje, os jogos são a maior forma de entretenimento que existe, especialmente nos Estados Unidos. São produtos que as pessoas chegam a usar 40 horas por semana e a idade média dos jogadores é de 35 anos. É algo que todo mundo está fazendo ou se familiarizando.
Valor: É possível transferir o entusiasmo e a concentração que as pessoas têm quando jogam em casa para o ambiente de trabalho?
Reeves: Sim, é muito importante captar essa energia. Esse caminho é fundamental para a tecnologia interativa nos negócios. Muitas vezes, as companhias desenvolvem ferramentas poderosas onde todos estão conectados, mas que não são divertidas. Geralmente, as pessoas se perguntam porque não podem ter no trabalho coisas mais parecidas com as que usam em casa.
Valor: É também um treino de estratégia para os líderes?
Reeves: Toda a ação nos videogames é estratégica. Mas uma coisa interessante é que ela envolve sempre tentativa e erro. No jogo, você não marca um encontro para o próximo mês a fim de pensar em como vai agir. Não é assim que funciona.
Valor: Existe um espaço maior para erros?
Reeves: Nos jogos, o fracasso é esperado e é bom, pois é possível aprender com ele. Quando se tem uma ideia, ela é colocada em prática imediatamente. Caso não funcione, você pensa em outra ação e, assim, experimenta alternativas rapidamente.
Valor: Precisar repetir muitas vezes um movimento até descobrir como passar para uma nova fase ajuda a pessoa a ser mais paciente? Isso funciona no trabalho?
Reeves: No jogo você tenta, tenta e tenta de novo. Uma característica dos videogames difícil de se conseguir no mundo corporativo é que neles você tem um feedback instantâneo e permanente. No trabalho, o retorno sobre o que você faz pode aparecer só no fim do trimestre, do semestre ou do ano.
Valor: Como os videogames podem ajudar as organizações a conquistar novos mercados e a vencer competidores?
Reeves: Engajando seus empregados. Imagine que seu trabalho se passa dentro de um jogo. Você faz parte de um time, recebe pontos e reconhecimento sobre todos os aspectos da sua atuação e sabe como as coisas estão indo. O mais interessante, porém, é que você se envolve na história da companhia. Mesmo em grandes organizações com cem mil funcionários, até a menor contribuição tem valor. No jogo, é possível saber claramente qual é a minha responsabilidade e a minha participação no sucesso do todo. Sei exatamente o que eu fiz para que as coisas funcionassem e sou reconhecido por isso. Sinto-me, dessa maneira, parte da história. Isso é algo extremamente valioso e que as organizações deveriam usar em seu favor.
05 março 2012
Entrevista com Eugene Fama
Eugene Fama é um economista norte-americano considerado o "pai das finanças modernas" e reconhecido por suas contribuições teóricas e empíricas para a Hipótese dos Mercados Eficientes (HME). Separadamente , Paul Samuelson e Fama propuseram os fundamentos da teoria que, posteriormente, ficou conhecida como HME. Em 1965, Samuelson afirmou que não existem estratégias capazes de gerar ganhos anormais no mercado, enquanto Fama propôs que os preços incorporam toda a informação relevante. Ou seja, as ideias se complementam, pois se os preços refletem toda a informação disponível, os agentes econõmicos não conseguirão obter ganhos anormais.
Destarte surgiu o paradoxo dos Mercados Eficientes , expressão cunhada por Peter Bernstein, que afirma que se todos os agentes considerassem que o mercado é eficiente, não existiria sentido buscar ganhos anormais, ou seja, não seria possível "bater o mercado". Ora, se isso fosse verossímel, eles iriam se posicionar de forma passiva diante do mercado.E, por consequência, o mesmo deixaria de ser eficiente e, por exemplo, não existiria sentindo em estudar análise de balanço. Em suma, a HME necessita de indíviduos céticos e desconfiados quanto à suas proposições ,e talvez por isso, torne-a interessante e instigante, ao menos para os acadêmicos, que se "divertem" realizando uma série de testes. É uma proposição assaz venerável que, em breve, talvez, proporcione o Nobel de Economia para E. Fama.
Em 1991, Fama afirmou que a HME considera que os preços do mercado refletem toda a informação disponível, até o ponto em que, os custos marginais de aquisição da informação não superem os benefícios marginais.
Destarte surgiu o paradoxo dos Mercados Eficientes , expressão cunhada por Peter Bernstein, que afirma que se todos os agentes considerassem que o mercado é eficiente, não existiria sentido buscar ganhos anormais, ou seja, não seria possível "bater o mercado". Ora, se isso fosse verossímel, eles iriam se posicionar de forma passiva diante do mercado.E, por consequência, o mesmo deixaria de ser eficiente e, por exemplo, não existiria sentindo em estudar análise de balanço. Em suma, a HME necessita de indíviduos céticos e desconfiados quanto à suas proposições ,e talvez por isso, torne-a interessante e instigante, ao menos para os acadêmicos, que se "divertem" realizando uma série de testes. É uma proposição assaz venerável que, em breve, talvez, proporcione o Nobel de Economia para E. Fama.
Em 1991, Fama afirmou que a HME considera que os preços do mercado refletem toda a informação disponível, até o ponto em que, os custos marginais de aquisição da informação não superem os benefícios marginais.
Toda teoria é uma supersimplificação da realidade ,e como tal, não é perfeita, mas não deve ser descartada. Aliás,a hipótese por si só não é testável,pois deve ser empiricamente testada em conjunto com algum modelo de precificação de ativo ou modelo de equilíbrio. Entretanto, o inverso também é verdadeiro. Ou seja, grande parte dos modelos de risco-retorno não pode ser testado sem considerar a eficiência do mercado. Tudo o que foi dito neste parágrafo é conhecido como joint hypothesis problem.
Apesar de ser falha, controversa e com inúmeras limitações, a HME ainda é útil para o entendimento do mercado de capitas, o retorno dos ativos financeiros e a dinâmica dos preços. Vários estudos em economia e finanças tratam dessa hipótese, então para maiores detalhes técnicos e material bibliográfico consulte o seguinte site: Efficient Markets Hypothesis.
Na entrevista, Fama comenta sobre a Hipótese dos Mercados Eficientes, a evolução das finanças, as possíveis causas da crise financeira de 2008 , o artigo My Life in Finance e alguns temas sobre macroeconomia. Destaquei alguns pontos, mas recomendo a leitura e/ou audição da entrevista na íntegra.
Inicialmente, Fama explica o que é um mercado de capitais eficiente e de forma clara e objetiva trata das três formas de testes que utilizou para testar a HME: fraca, semi-forte e forte.É interessante observar que ele se "arrependeu" de ter utilizado essa nomenclatura (taxonomia), pois estava apenas tentando categorizar os testes que realizava nos anos 70. Não obstante, essa taxonomia tornou-se clássica e ainda é citada em muitas pesquisas.
Russ: And so when we say markets are efficient, what do you mean by that?
Guest: What you mean is that prices at any point in time reflect all available information.
Russ: Now that idea--what's the distinction between the weak form and the strong form that people talk about?
Guest: Two words that I used in 1970 that I came to regret. Because I was trying to categorize various tests that were done. So, I called weak form tests, tests that only used past prices and returns to predict future prices and returns. And I called semi-strong form tests, tests that used other kinds of public information to predict returns, like an earnings announcement or something like that. And then I called strong form tests, tests that look at all available information;
Russ: And empirically, where do we stand today, do you believe and what has been established about those various hypotheses?
Guest: Well, believe it or not, the weak form one has been the one that has been subject to the most, what people call anomalies, in finance. Things that are inconsistent with either market efficiency or some model of risk and return. The big one at the moment is what people call momentum--prices seem to move in the same direction for short periods of time. So, the winners of last year tend to be winners for a few more months, and the losers tend to be losers for a few more months.
In the strong form tests, Ken French and I just published a paper called "Luck Versus Skill in Mutual Fund Performance," and basically looked at performance of the whole mutual fund industry--in the aggregate, together, and fund by fund, and try to distinguish to what extent returns are due to luck versus skill.
And the evidence basically says the tests it's skill in the extreme. But you've got skill in both extremes. That's something people have trouble accepting. But it comes down to a simple proposition, which is that active management in trying to pick stocks has to be a zero sum game, because the winners have to win at the expense of losers. And that's kind of a difficult concept. But it shows up when you look at the cross section of mutual fund returns, in other words the returns for all funds over very long periods of time. What you find is, if you give them back all their costs, there are people in the left tail that look too extreme and there are people in the right tail that look too extreme, and the right tail and left tail basically offset each other. If you look at the industry as a whole; the industry basically holds a market portfolio. That's all before costs. If you look at returns to investors then there is no evidence that anybody surely has information sufficient to cover their costs.
Em seguida, comenta sobre a posição dos investidores acerca da eficiência do mercado. É de fato o trecho mais interessante.
Russ: A friend of mine who is a hedge fund manager--before I made this call I asked him what he would ask you, and he said, well, his assessment is that efficient markets explain some tiny proportion of volatility of stock prices but there's still plenty of opportunity for a person to make money before markets adjust. And of course in doing so, make that adjustment actually happen and bring markets to equilibrium. Somebody has to provide the information or act on the information that is at least public and maybe only semi-public. What's your reaction to that comment?
Guest: That's the standard comment from an active manager. It's not true. Merton Miller always liked to emphasize that you could have full adjustment to information without trading. If all the information were available at very low cost, prices could adjust without any trading taking place. Just bid-ask prices. So, it's not true that somebody has to do it. But the issue is--this goes back to a famous paper by Grossman and Stiglitz--the issue really is what is the cost of the information? And I have a very simple model in mind. In my mind, information is available, available at very low cost, then the cost function gets very steep. Basically goes off to infinity very quickly.
Russ: And therefore?
Guest: And therefore prices are very efficient because the information that's available is costless.
Russ: But what's the implication of that steep incline? That information is not very--
Guest: It doesn't pay to try to take advantage of additional information.
Russ: It's not very valuable.
Guest: No, it's very valuable. If you were able to perfectly predict the future, of course that would be very valuable. But you can't. It becomes infinitely costly to do that.
Russ: So, your assessment, that you just gave me of the state of our knowledge of this area, I would say remains what it's been for some time--that at the individual certainly there is no return to--prices reflect all publicly available information for practical purposes for an individual investor.
Guest: For an individual investor? Even for an institutional investor.
Russ: Correct. So, what proportion of the economics and finance areas do you think agree with that?
Guest: Finance has developed quite a lot in the last 50 years that I've been in it. I would say the people who do asset pricing--portfolio theory, risk and return--those people think markets are pretty efficient. If you go to people in other areas who are not so familiar with the evidence in asset pricing, well, then there is more skepticism. I attribute that to the fact that finance, like other areas of economics, have become more specialized. And people just can't know all the stuff that's available.
Russ: Sure.
Guest: There's an incredible demand for market inefficiency. The whole investment management business is based on the idea that the market is not efficient. I say to my students when they take my course: If you really believe what I say and go out and recruit and tell people you think markets are efficient, you'll never get a job.
Russ: Yes, it's true. And so there's a certain bias, you are saying, to how people assess the evidence.
Guest: There's a bias. The bias is based, among professional money managers, the bias comes from the fact that they make more money from portraying themselves as active managers.
Posteriormente, faz uma excelente crítica sobre as causas da crise financeira de 2008 e o fetiche contemporâneo por bolhas de ativos:
I was going to ask you about the current crisis.
Guest: I have some unusual views on that, too.
Russ: I'd say that the mainstream view--and I recently saw a survey that said--it was an esteemed panel of economists; you weren't on it but it was still esteemed, both in finance and out of finance. And they asked them whether prices reflected information and there was near unanimity. Some strongly agreed; some just agreed. But there was also near unanimity that the housing market had been a bubble.
Guest: The nasty b-word.
Russ: Yes; and was showing some form of what we might call irrationality.
Guest: Okay, so they had strong feelings about that, getting mad about the word bubble.
Russ: Why?
Guest: Because I think people see bubbles with 20-20 hindsight. The term has lost its meaning. It used to mean something that had a more or less predictable ending. Now people use it to mean a big swing in prices, that after the fact is wrong. But all prices changes after the fact are wrong. Because new information comes out that makes what people thought two minutes ago wrong two minutes later. Housing bubble--if you think there was a housing bubble, there might have been; if you had predicted it, that would be fine; but the reality is, all markets did the same thing at the same time. So you have to really face that fact that if you think it was a housing bubble, it was a stock price bubble, it was a corporate bond bubble, it was a commodities bubble. Are economists really willing to live with a world where there are bubbles in everything at the same time?
Russ: And your explanation then of that phenomenon?
Guest: My explanation is you had a big recession. I think you can explain almost everything just by saying you had a big recession. A really big recession.
...Guest: Okay, but it wasn't just housing. That was my point when we started. The same thing was going on in all asset markets.
Russ: Well, the timing isn't quite identical for all asset markets, right? The stock market--the housing market starts to collapse I think around early-mid-2006. Guest: It stops rising, right.
Russ: And then begins a steady decline.
Guest: That decline was nothing compared to the stock market decline.
Russ: But when did that happen? Guest: I don't know the exact timing. Russ: It's not around then. It's later.
Guest: The onset of the recession started with the collapse of the stock market. The recession and the collapse of the stock market, the corporate bond market, all of that basically coincides. But that also coincides with the collapse of the securitized bond market.
Russ: Mortgage-backed securities.
Guest: The subprime mortgages and all of that. Russ: Well, yes; that happens through 2007, 2008. I guess there is some parallel. So, you are going to reverse the causation.
Guest: I'm not saying I know. What I'm saying is I can tell the whole story just based on the recession. And I don't think you can come up with evidence that contradicts that. But I'm not saying I know I'm right. I don't know. I'm just saying people read the evidence through a narrow lens.
Russ: Yes, they do. Confirmation bias.
Guest: And the rhetoric acquires a life of its own; so there are books written that basically all say the same thing about the crisis.
Russ: And you are arguing that they have essentially cherry-picked the data.
Guest: Well, they just look at pieces of the data and the fact that the housing market collapsed is taken to be the cause; but the housing market could collapse for other reasons. People don't just decide that prices aren't high any more. They have to look at supply and demand somewhere in the background.
Russ: We did have people holding second and third homes who didn't have the income and capability of repaying the first one.
Guest: Sure. Standards were relaxed. But then you have to look on the supply side, the lending side. The people who were lending to these people had the information.
Em determinado momento , o economista é questionado sobre as finanças comportamentais. É oportuno lembrar que esta faz parte das finanças "tradicionais" , pois fornece subsídios para sua melhor compreensão. Em outras palavras, é uma teoria complementar e não substituta do que já existia antes. Veja a crítica de Fama:
Russ: But let's go back to finance. There's been a big trend in recent years towards what's called behavioral finance. What's your assessment of that?
Guest: I think the behavioral people are very good at describing microeconomic behavior--the behavior of individuals--that doesn't seem quite rational. I think they are very good at that. The jump from there to markets is much more shaky.
Russ: Explain.
Guest: There are two types of behavioral economists. There are guys like my friend and colleague Richard Thaler, who are solidly based in psychology, reasoned economics but he's become a psychologist, basically, and he is coming from the research in psychology. Now there are other finance people who are basically what I call anomaly chasers. What they are doing is scouring the data for things that look like market inefficiency, and they classify that as behavioral finance.
Russ: They don't tell you about the times they can't find the anomaly.
Guest: Exactly. In all economics research, there is a multiple comparisons problem that never gets stated.
Russ: A multiple what?
Guest: The fact that the data have been used by so many other people and the people using it now use it in so many different ways that they don't report, that you have no real statistical basis to evaluate and come to a conclusion.
Guest: Right. I've had people say to me that the people who do this anomaly stuff, when they come and give a paper and I'll say, when you do this, that, or the other thing, and they'll say Yes. And I'll say, why don't you report it? And they'll say it wasn't interesting.
Em seguida, Fama diz o que pessoas inteligentes deveriam conhecer sobre finanças e comenta sobre a importância do paper e da equação de Black- Scholes para as ciências econômicas. Num recente artigo publicado no jornal The Guardian, Ian Stewart discute a equação e suas possíveis consequências nefastas para a economia mundial. É uma análise interessante e muito questionável, que está presente em seu novo livro:17 Equations That Changed the World .
Guest: I'm obviously going to be biased. I think all of our stuff on efficient markets would qualify. I think there is a lot of stuff in the corporate area, corporate governance and all of that, a huge field--that has penetrated to the practical level. The Black-Scholes option pricing paper in view is the most important economics paper of the century.
Russ: Why?
Guest: Because every academic, every economist whether he went into finance or not, read that paper. And it created an industry. In the applied financial domain. What else can claim that? So, I think we've learned a lot about risk and return. Some of it is intuitive. But there is a lot of stuff on which stocks are more or less risky. A lot of stuff on international markets.
Por fim, fala sobre suas perspectivas futuras para as pesquisas em finanças , dá um recado aos cientistas, fala um pouso sobre sua tese de doutorado e comenta sobre o artigo, autobiografia e bibliografia: My Life in Finance.
Guest: Oh, absolutely. What I say to my students is: I'm showing you the stuff that people have done in the last 30 years, but in 20 years, it may all be irrelevant; so the best I can do is to train you about how to think about these things, so you can absorb stuff that comes along in the future that may overturn what's there now. That's what makes this profession fun, I think--the fact that stuff can get overturned.
Russ: Of course, if we only have the illusion of understanding, or what Hayek called the pretense of knowledge, we could be doing some dangerous and stupid things under the guise of thinking we are making progress. So, you do have to be careful. Where do you think in the near future finance is going?
Guest: Oh, gee, I don't know. That's part of the fun of it. You just don't know. I wouldn't have been able to predict 30 years ago the stuff that evolved during those intervening 30 years. No way.
Russ: It's kind of a random walk.
Guest: I don't think it pays to think about it very much. There's so much serendipity in what happens in research. My best stuff has always been--I didn't start thinking about writing a great paper. I started thinking about a little problem; it just kept working in circles into a bigger problem. Or had offshoots that were related. I've beaten many topics to death, with the consequence I've got a lot of recognition; what started as a little thing developed into something much bigger. That's not a predictable process. Lots of little things end up as nothing.
Russ: And?
Guest: A student comes to me, a Ph.D. student, and says: I want to write a great paper. You can't start out to do that. You have to pick a problem and hope it works out into something that will get you a job, and hopefully a good one. But if you start saying: I want to come up with a great topic, you won't come up with anything.
Russ: You recently wrote a very nice essay, "My Life in Finance," that gives an overview of some of your contributions and some of your thinking along the way and all those little problems. You started out by talking about your thesis topic, where you had five ideas and Merton Miller said four of them weren't very good. Did you ever go back to any of those four?
Guest: No, actually. Merton was incredible. He had a great eye for stuff that would work and wouldn't work. I went to Belgium for two years to teach, and I came back and showed him the stuff I'd been working on, and I think he discarded like 8 out of 10 things. He was right on all of them.
Russ: Such is life.
Guest: It taught me that nobody can work in a vacuum. You really need colleagues around you to enrich your work. You get credit for it in the end, but there are a lot of inputs from other people that go into it in the meantime.
Apesar de ser falha, controversa e com inúmeras limitações, a HME ainda é útil para o entendimento do mercado de capitas, o retorno dos ativos financeiros e a dinâmica dos preços. Vários estudos em economia e finanças tratam dessa hipótese, então para maiores detalhes técnicos e material bibliográfico consulte o seguinte site: Efficient Markets Hypothesis.
Na entrevista, Fama comenta sobre a Hipótese dos Mercados Eficientes, a evolução das finanças, as possíveis causas da crise financeira de 2008 , o artigo My Life in Finance e alguns temas sobre macroeconomia. Destaquei alguns pontos, mas recomendo a leitura e/ou audição da entrevista na íntegra.
Inicialmente, Fama explica o que é um mercado de capitais eficiente e de forma clara e objetiva trata das três formas de testes que utilizou para testar a HME: fraca, semi-forte e forte.É interessante observar que ele se "arrependeu" de ter utilizado essa nomenclatura (taxonomia), pois estava apenas tentando categorizar os testes que realizava nos anos 70. Não obstante, essa taxonomia tornou-se clássica e ainda é citada em muitas pesquisas.
Russ: And so when we say markets are efficient, what do you mean by that?
Guest: What you mean is that prices at any point in time reflect all available information.
Russ: Now that idea--what's the distinction between the weak form and the strong form that people talk about?
Guest: Two words that I used in 1970 that I came to regret. Because I was trying to categorize various tests that were done. So, I called weak form tests, tests that only used past prices and returns to predict future prices and returns. And I called semi-strong form tests, tests that used other kinds of public information to predict returns, like an earnings announcement or something like that. And then I called strong form tests, tests that look at all available information;
Russ: And empirically, where do we stand today, do you believe and what has been established about those various hypotheses?
Guest: Well, believe it or not, the weak form one has been the one that has been subject to the most, what people call anomalies, in finance. Things that are inconsistent with either market efficiency or some model of risk and return. The big one at the moment is what people call momentum--prices seem to move in the same direction for short periods of time. So, the winners of last year tend to be winners for a few more months, and the losers tend to be losers for a few more months.
In the strong form tests, Ken French and I just published a paper called "Luck Versus Skill in Mutual Fund Performance," and basically looked at performance of the whole mutual fund industry--in the aggregate, together, and fund by fund, and try to distinguish to what extent returns are due to luck versus skill.
And the evidence basically says the tests it's skill in the extreme. But you've got skill in both extremes. That's something people have trouble accepting. But it comes down to a simple proposition, which is that active management in trying to pick stocks has to be a zero sum game, because the winners have to win at the expense of losers. And that's kind of a difficult concept. But it shows up when you look at the cross section of mutual fund returns, in other words the returns for all funds over very long periods of time. What you find is, if you give them back all their costs, there are people in the left tail that look too extreme and there are people in the right tail that look too extreme, and the right tail and left tail basically offset each other. If you look at the industry as a whole; the industry basically holds a market portfolio. That's all before costs. If you look at returns to investors then there is no evidence that anybody surely has information sufficient to cover their costs.
Em seguida, comenta sobre a posição dos investidores acerca da eficiência do mercado. É de fato o trecho mais interessante.
Russ: A friend of mine who is a hedge fund manager--before I made this call I asked him what he would ask you, and he said, well, his assessment is that efficient markets explain some tiny proportion of volatility of stock prices but there's still plenty of opportunity for a person to make money before markets adjust. And of course in doing so, make that adjustment actually happen and bring markets to equilibrium. Somebody has to provide the information or act on the information that is at least public and maybe only semi-public. What's your reaction to that comment?
Guest: That's the standard comment from an active manager. It's not true. Merton Miller always liked to emphasize that you could have full adjustment to information without trading. If all the information were available at very low cost, prices could adjust without any trading taking place. Just bid-ask prices. So, it's not true that somebody has to do it. But the issue is--this goes back to a famous paper by Grossman and Stiglitz--the issue really is what is the cost of the information? And I have a very simple model in mind. In my mind, information is available, available at very low cost, then the cost function gets very steep. Basically goes off to infinity very quickly.
Russ: And therefore?
Guest: And therefore prices are very efficient because the information that's available is costless.
Russ: But what's the implication of that steep incline? That information is not very--
Guest: It doesn't pay to try to take advantage of additional information.
Russ: It's not very valuable.
Guest: No, it's very valuable. If you were able to perfectly predict the future, of course that would be very valuable. But you can't. It becomes infinitely costly to do that.
Russ: So, your assessment, that you just gave me of the state of our knowledge of this area, I would say remains what it's been for some time--that at the individual certainly there is no return to--prices reflect all publicly available information for practical purposes for an individual investor.
Guest: For an individual investor? Even for an institutional investor.
Russ: Correct. So, what proportion of the economics and finance areas do you think agree with that?
Guest: Finance has developed quite a lot in the last 50 years that I've been in it. I would say the people who do asset pricing--portfolio theory, risk and return--those people think markets are pretty efficient. If you go to people in other areas who are not so familiar with the evidence in asset pricing, well, then there is more skepticism. I attribute that to the fact that finance, like other areas of economics, have become more specialized. And people just can't know all the stuff that's available.
Russ: Sure.
Guest: There's an incredible demand for market inefficiency. The whole investment management business is based on the idea that the market is not efficient. I say to my students when they take my course: If you really believe what I say and go out and recruit and tell people you think markets are efficient, you'll never get a job.
Russ: Yes, it's true. And so there's a certain bias, you are saying, to how people assess the evidence.
Guest: There's a bias. The bias is based, among professional money managers, the bias comes from the fact that they make more money from portraying themselves as active managers.
Posteriormente, faz uma excelente crítica sobre as causas da crise financeira de 2008 e o fetiche contemporâneo por bolhas de ativos:
I was going to ask you about the current crisis.
Guest: I have some unusual views on that, too.
Russ: I'd say that the mainstream view--and I recently saw a survey that said--it was an esteemed panel of economists; you weren't on it but it was still esteemed, both in finance and out of finance. And they asked them whether prices reflected information and there was near unanimity. Some strongly agreed; some just agreed. But there was also near unanimity that the housing market had been a bubble.
Guest: The nasty b-word.
Russ: Yes; and was showing some form of what we might call irrationality.
Guest: Okay, so they had strong feelings about that, getting mad about the word bubble.
Russ: Why?
Guest: Because I think people see bubbles with 20-20 hindsight. The term has lost its meaning. It used to mean something that had a more or less predictable ending. Now people use it to mean a big swing in prices, that after the fact is wrong. But all prices changes after the fact are wrong. Because new information comes out that makes what people thought two minutes ago wrong two minutes later. Housing bubble--if you think there was a housing bubble, there might have been; if you had predicted it, that would be fine; but the reality is, all markets did the same thing at the same time. So you have to really face that fact that if you think it was a housing bubble, it was a stock price bubble, it was a corporate bond bubble, it was a commodities bubble. Are economists really willing to live with a world where there are bubbles in everything at the same time?
Russ: And your explanation then of that phenomenon?
Guest: My explanation is you had a big recession. I think you can explain almost everything just by saying you had a big recession. A really big recession.
...Guest: Okay, but it wasn't just housing. That was my point when we started. The same thing was going on in all asset markets.
Russ: Well, the timing isn't quite identical for all asset markets, right? The stock market--the housing market starts to collapse I think around early-mid-2006. Guest: It stops rising, right.
Russ: And then begins a steady decline.
Guest: That decline was nothing compared to the stock market decline.
Russ: But when did that happen? Guest: I don't know the exact timing. Russ: It's not around then. It's later.
Guest: The onset of the recession started with the collapse of the stock market. The recession and the collapse of the stock market, the corporate bond market, all of that basically coincides. But that also coincides with the collapse of the securitized bond market.
Russ: Mortgage-backed securities.
Guest: The subprime mortgages and all of that. Russ: Well, yes; that happens through 2007, 2008. I guess there is some parallel. So, you are going to reverse the causation.
Guest: I'm not saying I know. What I'm saying is I can tell the whole story just based on the recession. And I don't think you can come up with evidence that contradicts that. But I'm not saying I know I'm right. I don't know. I'm just saying people read the evidence through a narrow lens.
Russ: Yes, they do. Confirmation bias.
Guest: And the rhetoric acquires a life of its own; so there are books written that basically all say the same thing about the crisis.
Russ: And you are arguing that they have essentially cherry-picked the data.
Guest: Well, they just look at pieces of the data and the fact that the housing market collapsed is taken to be the cause; but the housing market could collapse for other reasons. People don't just decide that prices aren't high any more. They have to look at supply and demand somewhere in the background.
Russ: We did have people holding second and third homes who didn't have the income and capability of repaying the first one.
Guest: Sure. Standards were relaxed. But then you have to look on the supply side, the lending side. The people who were lending to these people had the information.
Em determinado momento , o economista é questionado sobre as finanças comportamentais. É oportuno lembrar que esta faz parte das finanças "tradicionais" , pois fornece subsídios para sua melhor compreensão. Em outras palavras, é uma teoria complementar e não substituta do que já existia antes. Veja a crítica de Fama:
Russ: But let's go back to finance. There's been a big trend in recent years towards what's called behavioral finance. What's your assessment of that?
Guest: I think the behavioral people are very good at describing microeconomic behavior--the behavior of individuals--that doesn't seem quite rational. I think they are very good at that. The jump from there to markets is much more shaky.
Russ: Explain.
Guest: There are two types of behavioral economists. There are guys like my friend and colleague Richard Thaler, who are solidly based in psychology, reasoned economics but he's become a psychologist, basically, and he is coming from the research in psychology. Now there are other finance people who are basically what I call anomaly chasers. What they are doing is scouring the data for things that look like market inefficiency, and they classify that as behavioral finance.
Russ: They don't tell you about the times they can't find the anomaly.
Guest: Exactly. In all economics research, there is a multiple comparisons problem that never gets stated.
Russ: A multiple what?
Guest: The fact that the data have been used by so many other people and the people using it now use it in so many different ways that they don't report, that you have no real statistical basis to evaluate and come to a conclusion.
Guest: Right. I've had people say to me that the people who do this anomaly stuff, when they come and give a paper and I'll say, when you do this, that, or the other thing, and they'll say Yes. And I'll say, why don't you report it? And they'll say it wasn't interesting.
Em seguida, Fama diz o que pessoas inteligentes deveriam conhecer sobre finanças e comenta sobre a importância do paper e da equação de Black- Scholes para as ciências econômicas. Num recente artigo publicado no jornal The Guardian, Ian Stewart discute a equação e suas possíveis consequências nefastas para a economia mundial. É uma análise interessante e muito questionável, que está presente em seu novo livro:17 Equations That Changed the World .
Guest: I'm obviously going to be biased. I think all of our stuff on efficient markets would qualify. I think there is a lot of stuff in the corporate area, corporate governance and all of that, a huge field--that has penetrated to the practical level. The Black-Scholes option pricing paper in view is the most important economics paper of the century.
Russ: Why?
Guest: Because every academic, every economist whether he went into finance or not, read that paper. And it created an industry. In the applied financial domain. What else can claim that? So, I think we've learned a lot about risk and return. Some of it is intuitive. But there is a lot of stuff on which stocks are more or less risky. A lot of stuff on international markets.
Por fim, fala sobre suas perspectivas futuras para as pesquisas em finanças , dá um recado aos cientistas, fala um pouso sobre sua tese de doutorado e comenta sobre o artigo, autobiografia e bibliografia: My Life in Finance.
Guest: Oh, absolutely. What I say to my students is: I'm showing you the stuff that people have done in the last 30 years, but in 20 years, it may all be irrelevant; so the best I can do is to train you about how to think about these things, so you can absorb stuff that comes along in the future that may overturn what's there now. That's what makes this profession fun, I think--the fact that stuff can get overturned.
Russ: Of course, if we only have the illusion of understanding, or what Hayek called the pretense of knowledge, we could be doing some dangerous and stupid things under the guise of thinking we are making progress. So, you do have to be careful. Where do you think in the near future finance is going?
Guest: Oh, gee, I don't know. That's part of the fun of it. You just don't know. I wouldn't have been able to predict 30 years ago the stuff that evolved during those intervening 30 years. No way.
Russ: It's kind of a random walk.
Guest: I don't think it pays to think about it very much. There's so much serendipity in what happens in research. My best stuff has always been--I didn't start thinking about writing a great paper. I started thinking about a little problem; it just kept working in circles into a bigger problem. Or had offshoots that were related. I've beaten many topics to death, with the consequence I've got a lot of recognition; what started as a little thing developed into something much bigger. That's not a predictable process. Lots of little things end up as nothing.
Russ: And?
Guest: A student comes to me, a Ph.D. student, and says: I want to write a great paper. You can't start out to do that. You have to pick a problem and hope it works out into something that will get you a job, and hopefully a good one. But if you start saying: I want to come up with a great topic, you won't come up with anything.
Russ: You recently wrote a very nice essay, "My Life in Finance," that gives an overview of some of your contributions and some of your thinking along the way and all those little problems. You started out by talking about your thesis topic, where you had five ideas and Merton Miller said four of them weren't very good. Did you ever go back to any of those four?
Guest: No, actually. Merton was incredible. He had a great eye for stuff that would work and wouldn't work. I went to Belgium for two years to teach, and I came back and showed him the stuff I'd been working on, and I think he discarded like 8 out of 10 things. He was right on all of them.
Russ: Such is life.
Guest: It taught me that nobody can work in a vacuum. You really need colleagues around you to enrich your work. You get credit for it in the end, but there are a lot of inputs from other people that go into it in the meantime.
19 fevereiro 2012
Rir é o melhor remédio
05 janeiro 2012
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A importãncia da receita no processo de avaliação
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A lista dos melhores de 2011 (inclui filmes, livros, quadrinhos …)
Os melhores filmes de 2011 (Senna é 12o.)
Crime suíço
EUA condenam banqueiros suíços por crime tributário
Esposa do Presidente do Banco Central da Suiça ganhou dinheiro no mercado cambial
Curiosidade
Seleção Brasileira vale 422 milhões de euros. Vale mesmo?
Seleção vale menos que o Barcelona
Beatles; quem escreveu que música
Despertador que foge
Vídeo de 1923: Explicando a teoria da relatividade de Einstein
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