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...

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...

In the first part of the paper, we use translog indexes to measure the rate of total factor productivity growth (TFPG) in 80 different sectors of the Brazilian manufacturing industry in the 1970-80 period. In the second part, we conduct both correlation and regression analyses to identify...

The objective of this paper is to identify variables that influenced the efficiency level of Brazilian manufacturing establishments in 1970 and 1980. Efficiency is defined as the ratio of actual to best practice output, which is measured using deterministic translog frontier production...

In this paper we estimate the rate of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in 80 sectors of Brazilian manufacturing industry and use production functions to decompose TFP growth into technological progress and changes in efficiency. We find that growth of TFP was caused, in most sectors, by...