This study has two central objectives. We first describe in detail the structure and behavior of Brazilian families during their life cycle. [1] Secondly, we investigate the main socioeconomic determining factors of alterations in families structure and behavior over the past few decades. We...

This paper studies equity price volatility in general equilibrium with news shocks about future productivity and monetary policy. As West (1998) shows, in a partial equilibrium present discounted value model, news about the future cash flow reduces asset price volatility. This paper shows that...

While economists have tended to focus on specific public policies when developing recommendations, the achievement of welfare objectives might depend more on the quality of policies than their content. This paper develops several measures of the qualities of policies across countries, arguing...

This paper explores how different levels of knowledge correlate with desirable preventive and curative practices against malaria in Honduras. The paper additionally analyzes “information externalities” associated with non-specific malaria health services, communicational campaigns and...

This paper studies the relationship between the hazard rate of the exit of a president of a central bank and a measure of credibility in monetary policy. The expected hazard rate of exit is estimated as a function of legal and political variables. The measure of credibility is the expected...

This paper studies the joint effect of economic and political inequalities on redistributive taxation and institutional quality. The theoretical model suggests that income inequality, coupled with political bias in favor of the rich, decreases redistribution and lowers institutional quality. The...

This paper proposes an extension of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition from two to a continuum of comparison groups. The proposed decomposition is then estimated for the case of racial wage differences in urban Peru, exploiting a novel data set that allows the capturing of mestizaje (racial mixtures)

Peru has one of the highest informality rates in Latin America, with almost 60 percent of the urban labor force working at the margins of labor market legislation or in microenterprises that lack basic labor market standards (Marcouiller, Ruiz de Castilla, and Woodruff, 1997). This paper...

Industrial agglomerations or `clusters` arise in the presence of industry-specific and local externalities, also called Marshallian externalities. The standard argument is that such externalities may justify a policy of infant-industry protection to allow and encourage clusters to emerge. This...