The goal of this project is to construct leading indicators that anticipate inflation cycle turning points on a real time monitoring basis. As a first step, turning points of the IPCA inflation are determined using a periodic stochastic Markov switching model. These turning points are the event...

This paper presents an application of the model of Black, Derman & Toy related to the pricing of options of fixed income assets. The model is a non-stationary one, where the mean reversion or volatility reversion or both are functions of time. The model makes it possible to calculate the price...

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision recognizes that one of the greatest technical challenges to the implementation of the new Basel II Accord lies on the validation of the banks’ internal credit rating models (CRMs). This study investigates new proposals of statistical tests for...

This paper examines the relationship between stock returns and volatility over the period of June 1990 to April 2002. We study firm-level relationship between stock returns and volatility for a sample of 25 time series for Brazilian stocks. Using Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR) empirical...

This paper extends the general equilibrium literature on bank competition in order to evaluate its role on the performance of the monetary policy. A new formulation of a financial contract taking into consideration both market power by banks as well as costly state verification is proposed here....

In this paper, we study how different choices of loadings affect forecasting in the exponential term structure model proposed by Diebold and Li (2006). The loadings are defined through a specific parameter lambda which controls both the decaying speed of the slope as well as the maximum of the...

Brazil has put in place an inflation-targeting framework for monetary policy in mid-1999, less than six months after moving to a floating exchange rate system. This paper presents the macroeconomic background that has led to the shift in monetary policy regime, and describes the general...

Many models were used to identify the factors affecting the demand for overnight funds by commercial banks. Theses models overcome overdispersion problems caused by excess of zeros found in the dataset. Generalized Linear Latent and Mixed Models (GLLAMM) constitute a class of models which allows...

There is a broad literature documenting the recent trend towards a larger foreign banking presence in both mature and emerging markets. Less documented are the few situations where banking internationalization has contracted. Brazil is one such case. After a large-scale entry in the late 90s,...

We study optimal monetary policy when inequality is present by introducing agents with different productivities, wages, and financial market accesses into a general equilibrium model with sticky prices. Our main results are: (i) There is a channel from interest rate to inflation throughout...