We use data on immigrants who live in the United States to study the effects of exposure to hyperinflation on occupational choice. To do so, we calculate the number of years an individual had lived under hyperinflation before arriving to the US. We find that its marginal effect on the...

Since the conquest of hyperinflation, with the Real Plan, in 1994, the Brazilian financial system has grown from early infancy to late adolescence. We describe the process of maturing with emphasis on the defining features of the Brazilian financial system over the last 20 years: 1)...

Mimicking the US in 1980 and 1990s, Brazil is a remarkable case of a major shift in homicides. After increasing steadily throughout the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, homicides reached a peak in 2003, and then fell. I show a strong time-series co-movement between homicide rates and the...

Using the different response timings of credit demand and supply, we isolate supply shifts after monetary policy shocks. We show that the bank lending channel exists in Brazil: after an increase (decrease) in the basic interest rate (Selic), banks reduce (increase) the quantity of new loans and...

In 2004, Brazil provided an interesting natural experiment concerning personal credit. A new law was enacted allowing banks to offer loans with repayment through automatic payroll or social security benefit deduction, thus removing a significant part of the moral hazard problem by eliminating...

After reaching a historic peak by the end of the 1990s, homicides in large cities in the state of São Paulo dropped sharply. Several explanations have been advanced, most prominently improvements in policing, adoption of policies such as dry laws, and increased incarceration. In this paper, we...

We measure the competitive effect of public ownership of banks in concentrated local banking markets in Brazil by extending Bresnahan and Reiss’s [1991] framework to measure the effects of entry in concentrated markets. We use variation in market size, the number of competitors and their...