The behavior of bank interest spreads in Brazil reveal two stylized facts. First, a remarkable fall in the average rates since early 1999. Second, a strong and persistent dispersion of rates across banks. Such stylized facts suggest that both the time series and the cross section dimensions are...

In the last years, regulatory agencies of many countries in the world, following recomendations of Basel Committee, have compeled financial institutions to maintain a minimum capital requirements to cover market and credit risks. This paper investigates the consequences about social welfare,...

This paper uses the cointegration framework to study the series of total private credit and housing finance volumes in the Brazilian banking system. A stationary long-term relationship is identified suggesting that the recent observed deviation can be classified as a short-term desequilibrium....

In July 1999, Brazil implemented a formal inflation-targeting framework for monetary policy, less than six months after moving to a floating exchange rate regime. This work evaluates the initial years of the Brazilian experience with inflation targeting. During the period the inflation rate...

Although not explicitly reported, option traders on the Bovespa exchange pay an implicit bid-ask spread on each trade. Reported transaction prices that comprise the databases previously used to study the Brazilian options markets do not reflect actual option values at the time of the trades, but...

This paper assesses the first three years of the inflation-targeting regime in Brazil adopted in July 1999. The inflation-targeting framework has shown to be highly important for the macroeconomic stabilization. We stress three important challenges: construction of credibility, change in...

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the discussion of the financial aspects of dollarization and optimum currency areas. Based on the model of self-fulfilling debt crisis developed by Cole and Kehoe [4], it is possible to evaluate the comparative welfare of economies, which either...

This paper presents measures of long-range dependence in daily exchange rates of the Brazilian Real against the US Dollar, taken from 1995 to 2004 employing the classical R/S analysis with a rolling sample. It analyses the switch from a crawling peg exchange regime to a floating exchange regime,...

This work has objective to verify, from causality and cointegration tests, if monetary aggregates can anticipate fluctuations in by products and prices in Brazil. Monthly data, for monetary aggregates, IPCA and real GDP, from jan/95 to mar/02 have been used. The broad money supply were evaluated...

The aim of this paper is to develop a business cycle analysis for Brazil, Argentina and the United States, emphasizing the regime switches that occurred throughout the economic fluctuations experienced by these countries. Recent studies on business cycles have favored the international business...