The wave of privatization in the 1980s and 1990s increased productivity of many previously state owned enterprises (SOEs). However, governments often do not have sufficient support to privatize SOEs. We provide evidence that threatening privatization and market competition (entry of new firms)...

In the beginning of the eighties the Brazilian growth rate of per capita GDP fell abruptly. In this paper we ask if this fall can be ex-plained by the behavior of technological progress (measured by Total Factor Productivity or TFP). Our main conclusion is that the behavior of TFP can fairly...

We ask whether barriers to entry are a quantitatively important reason for the income gap between developing countries and the U.S. We develop a tractable general equilibrium model that captures the effects of barriers to entry and the other main classes of distortion typically considered in the...

We study the effects of large transportation costs on economic development. Since reliable data for developing countries are hard to come by, we go back in time to the Midwest and the Northeast of the U.S. This is a natural case to study because starting from 1840 decent data is available...

We ask how barriers to international trade affect TFP when there are monopoly rights in the import-competing industries. Holmes and Schmitz (1995) show that without barriers to trade TFP in these industries is as large as possible. We study the general case of finite barriers to trade. We find...

Este artigo objetiva verificar a contribuição dos dispêndios em publicidade no valor da empresa, considerando a interação com os ciclos econômicos. Estes, que por sua vez seguem um processo estocástico e podem influenciar a decisão de quanto gastar em publicidade. Ao otimizar os...

Esta pesquisa buscou identificar o efeito da desigualdade no crescimento. Analisando as vinte e sete Unidades Federativas do Brasil, cobrindo o período de 1995 a 2009, buscou-se mitigar os problemas de comparabilidade presentes nas pesquisas cross-country.Foram empregados quatro métodos...

Com a descoberta de petróleo na camada de pré-sal, em setembro de 2008, as reservas brasileiras passaram de 14 bilhões para 33 bilhões de barris, impulsionando mudanças na legislação do petróleo. Em agosto de 2008, foram enviados quatro projetos de lei ao congresso nacional que mudaram o...