We extend the literature on interest group behavior and policy outcomes by examining how groups with limited resources (votes and campaign contributions) effectively influence government by manipulating media information to voters. Voters in turn lobby politicians to implement the group's...

Tenancy has been a means for labor to advance their socio-economic condition in agriculture yet in Brazil and Latin America, tenancy rates are low compared to the U.S. and the OECD countries. We test for the importance of insecure property rights in Brazil on the reluctance of landowners to rent...

We present a conceptual framework to better understand the interaction between settlement and the emergence of de facto property rights on frontiers prior to governments establishing and enforcing de jure property rights. In this framework, potential rents associated with more exclusivity drives...

The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 gave relatively strong powers to the President. We model and test Executive-Legislative relations in Brazil and demonstrate that Presidents have used pork as a political currency to exchange for votes on policy reforms. In particular Presidents Cardoso and Lula...

This paper analyzes export performance in Brazil, discussing the roles played by export diversification, productivity enhancements, policy, and natural resource endowments. First, we provide a brief account of Brazil’s recent export performance and analyze changes in the competitiveness of...

This paper is devoted to a quantitative assessment of Brazil's long-term growth experience. The analysis herein shows that savings alone do not explain the growth slump after 1980. Our explanation centers on the evolution of the output-capital ratio and on changes in the relative price of...

The last 20 years were a period of major political, economic, social, and institutional reform in Brazil. In the first half of the 1990s, reformers opened the economy to foreign trade and both direct and portfolio investment, sold off a number of large and traditional state-owned enterprises,...

Financial markets help to foster growth and productivity through their role in mobilizing savings to finance investment and production, selecting and monitoring investment projects, diversifying risks, and allowing investment and production to be carried out in the most productive scale and time...

This paper, written as a tribute to Albert Hirschman's work and thought, deals with the patterns of structural change and financing economic growth in Brazil from 1950 to 1980. Special attention in given to the role of external finance and to the evolving forms of public sector intervention....

The Brazilian economy was characterized in the 1990s by marked changes from previous decades, many of which induced by economic policy: trade and financial liberalization, privatization, other State reform measures and the beginnings of economic stabilization with the implementation of the Real...