Brazil is frequently portrayed as exhibiting persistent and structural economic inequality that is rooted in the early colonial experience, and is believed to undermine development in the long run. I construct original measures of agricultural inequality for 1905 in what is today Brazil’s...

The authors analyze the different options-liquidation, federalization, privatization, and restructuring-that the Brazilian state government had for the transformation of state banks under the Programa de Incentivo á Redução do Setor Público Estadual na Atividade Bancária (PROES) in the late...