Mimicking the "Great American Crime Decline" (Zimiring, 2007), violent crime in the state of São Paulo dropped sharply in the 2000s after rising steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This paper evaluates the role of crack cocaine in explaining the aggregate dynamics in violence. Four facts...

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...

This paper tests and find evidence that support the view that credit interest rates respond more to increases than to decreases in the Central Bank basic interest rate (Selic). This asymmetry is robust to an event analysis, in which the availability of a dataset containing daily information is...