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Which are the ways of knowing, understanding and justifying war by the Popes since the twentieth century? The Catholic Church has a long tradition to determine the need of wars, called the Christian just war founded by St. Augustine. Since the twentieth century, however, the popes have showed hesitation, contradiction and negligence towards just war approach.

This paper presents new evidence that increases in college enrollment lead to a decline in the average quality of college graduates between 1960 and 2000, resulting in a decrease of 6 percentage points in the college premium. A standard demand and supply framework can qualitatively account for the trend in the college and age premia over this period, but substantial quantitative adjustments are needed to account for changes in quality. (JEL I23, J24, J31)

This paper extends the method of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil [Heckman, J. and Vytlacil, E., 1999. Local instrumental variable and latent variable models for identifying and bounding treatment effects. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96, 4730–4734; Heckman, J. and Vytlacil, E., 2001. Local Instrumental Variables. In: C. Hsiao, K. Morimune, and J. Powells, (Eds.), Nonlinear Statistical Modeling: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics: Essays in Honor of Takeshi Amemiya, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, (2000), pp. 1–46; Heckman, J. and Vytlacil E., 2005. Structural equations, treatment, effects and econometric policy evaluation. Econometrica 73(3), 669–738] to the estimation of not only means, but also distributions of potential outcomes. The newly developed method is illustrated by applying it to changes in college enrollment and wage inequality using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1979. Increases in college enrollment cause changes in the distribution of ability among college and high school graduates. This paper estimates a semiparametric selection model of schooling and wages to show that, for fixed skill prices, a 14% increase in college participation (analogous to the increase observed in the 1980s), reduces the college premium by 12% and increases the 90-10 percentile ratio among college graduates by 2%.

Neste artigo, discuto, principalmente, a inserção dos gastos públicos em modelos de mudança climática. Considero a análise de Kemfert, Lise e Tol (2004) como exemplo de modelo formal que agrega as questões econômicas e climáticas, e amplio a discussão com o estudo da inserção dos gastos públicos com gestão ambiental e da matriz energética. Mostro que as estruturas econômicas e físicas dos países estabelecem diferentes gastos públicos, com diferentes impactos ambientais e conseqüências para outras nações e isto afeta sobremaneira os resultados de qualquer modelo econômico. Em termos dos gastos públicos com meio ambiente, observo especificamente o caso brasileiro, verificando os gastos públicos federais com Gestão Ambiental no Brasil de 2000 a 2006. Defendo a importância de se considerar as diversas possibilidades de despesas públicas com gestão ambiental, para o tratamento das questões relativas à mudança climática.

This paper investigates how enforcement of labor regulation affects the firm's use of informal labor and firm performance. Using firm level data on informal employment and firm performance, and administrative data on enforcement of regulation at the city level, we show that in areas where law enforcement is stricter firms employ a smaller amount of informal employment. Furthermore, by reducing the firm's access to unregulated labor, stricter enforcement is also associated with lower labor productivity. We control for different regional and firm characteristics, and we instrument enforcement with a measure of the access of labor inspectors to firms. Taken together, our findings suggest that increased access to labor flexibility significantly improves firm performance.

This paper investigates how enforcement of labor regulation affects the firm's use of informal employment and its impact on firm performance. Using firm level data on informal employment and firm performance, and administrative data on enforcement of regulation at the city level, we show that in areas where law enforcement is stricter firms employ a smaller amount of informal employment. Furthermore, by reducing the firm's access to unregulated labor, stricter enforcement also decreases average wages, productivity and investment. Our results are robust to several specification changes, and to instrumenting enforcement with 1) measures of access of labor inspectors to firms and 2) measures of general law enforcement in the area where the firm is located.