This paper investigates the income inequality generated by a job search process when different cohorts of homogeneous workers are allowed to have different degrees of impatience. Using the fact the average wage under the invariant Markovian distribution is a decreasing function of the time...

In this paper I devise a new channel by means of which the (empirically documented) positive correlation between inflation and income inequality can be understood. Available empirical evidence reveals that inflation increases wage dispersion. For this reason, the higher the inflation rate, the...

Lawrance (1991) has shown, through the estimation of consumption Euler equations, that subjective rates of impatience (time preference) in the U.S. are three to five percentage points higher for house holds with lower average labor incomes than for those with higher labor income. From a...

Several empirical studies in the literature have documented the existence of a positive correlation between income inequality and unemployment. I provide a theoretical framework under which this correlation can be better understood. The analysis is based on a dynamic job search under...

Several works in the shopping-time and in the human-capital literature, due to the nonconcavity of the underlying Hamiltonian, use first-order conditions in dynamic optimization to characterize necessity, but not sufficiency, in intertemporal problems. In this work I choose one paper in each one...

In this work I analyze the model proposed by Goldfajn (2000) to study the choice of the denomination of the public debt. The main purpose of the analysis is pointing out possible reasons why new em pirical evidence provided by Bevilaqua, Garcia and Nechio (2004), regarding a more recent time...

I start presenting an explicit solution to Taylorís (2001) model, in order to illustrate the link between the target interest rate and the overnight interest rate prevailing in the economy. Next, I use Vector Auto Regressions to shed some light on the evolution of key macroeconomic variables...

This paper uses 1992:1-2004:2 quarterly data and two different methods (approximation under lognormality and calibration) to evaluate the existence of an equity-premium puzzle in Brazil. In contrast with some previous works in the Brazilian literature, I conclude that the model used by Mehra and...

Using data from the United States, Japan, Germany , United Kingdom and France, Sims (1992) found that positive innovations to short term interest rates led to sharp, persistent increases in the price level. The result was confirmed by other authors and, as a consequence of its non-expectable...

This paper presents an overview of the Brazilian macroeconomy by analyzing the evolution of some specific time series. The presentation is made through a sequence of graphs. Several remarkable historical points and open questions come up in the data. These include, among others, the drop in...