This report analyzes the legislation about government procurement adopted in the context of trade agreements of the European Union, the World Trade Organization and Nafta, and the rules about this subject in United States and Brazil. Its main goal is to provide information that could support the...

This article verifies the occurrence of a real estate bubble in the Brazilian economy. Overall, our results suggest the existence of a bubble in the real estate sector of the economy. The Austrian School of economics provides a solid explanation to this phenomenon, which are reinforced by...

It is proposed to estimate two versions of the potential output for Brazil in the period 1992-2010, through the production function and the HP filter, and use these results to: i) assess the relevance of the output gap in the monetary policy decisions (comparing the two estimates); and ii) to...

We present a detailed survey of changes in the reserve requirement system in Brazil and analyze the system's main functions and goals during the period from 1994 to 2012. We identify four different subperiods with respect to the use of this policy tool. In the first subperiod, from july 1994 to...

The recent financial crisis shed a new light on issues that, previously, were not perceived as serious or important. It highlighted the close ties between fiat money and government bonds denominated in it that imply a strong relationship between Treasury and Central Bank. Two ill-conceived views...

This paper deals with the financial statements of Central Banks. The starting point is the analysis of their balance sheets, which reveal their strong connections, on the one hand, with the National Treasuries; on the other hand, with the financial firms. The balance sheets reveal, besides the...