This paper tests the occurrence of rational bubbles in the exchange rate of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the ‘BRICS' countries group) against the US dollar. We consider bubbles of the periodically recurring variety, and assume that the fundamental value follows a modified PPP...

The structure introduced by Armington (1969) has been used to analyze trade policy in partial and general equilibrium models. The Armington elasticities, the degree of substitution between domestic and import goods are known to be important, but are seldom estimated empirically. Therefore, we...

In this paper we model foreign capital flow to Brazil as stemming from an investment decision that whose risk depends on the expected rate of loss of foreign reserves. This motivates the estimation of an empirical relationship between these two variables that is valid for "normal" periods (when...

The Brazilian exchange rate has suffered strong fluctuations in the last year. They resulted from the Argentina crises and the energetic crises which influenced expectations about the future value of this variable, however the fundamentals of the economy did not vary significantly. In this paper...

This paper examines the sensitivity of the growth-inequality tradeoff to the progressivity of the tax structure. Using an endogenous growth model calibrated to approximate the US tax structure, we simulate a 5% reduction in the economy-wide average tax rate attained by alternative combinations...