This paper presents a simple dynamic macroeconomic model of a bank-dominated financial system that captures some of the key credit market imperfections commonly found in middle-income countries. The model is used to analyze the interactions between monetary and macroprudential policies,...

There is no standard rule for the definition of an “optimal level” of international reserves and several assumptions underlie the rationale behind holding reserves. There are various theoretical approaches, but no standard for the evaluation of the performance of “optimal level” models,...

Our objective in this paper is to analyze empirically the relationship between the external finance premium of non-financial corporations in Brazil with their default probability and with their demand for inventories. As for the former relation, we find that corporations that have greater...

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the banking structure of the four major emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China - BRIC), and Latin American countries. We employ a stochastic frontier model to estimate the values of cost efficiency and compare these efficiency measures...

Periods of Financial Stability are associated to low bank efficiency and high non-performing loans in credit portfolios. Therefore, this paper studies the relationship between bank efficiency and non-performing loans. To evaluate the bank efficiency, we employ a Data Envelopment Analysis. We...

This paper aims to compare the interest rates charged by credit unions and banks (commercial and multiple) in order to check whether there are differences between the rates charged for loans without personal assignment and the effects of this difference in interest rates charged by banks in...

I show that the combination of small positive trend inflation with staggered prices may account for the large relative volatilities found in US labor market data. The model does not have any wage rigidity and is hit only by an aggregate technology shock. The calibration procedure uses standard...

In the inflation target program in Brazil, the Committee of Monetary Policy (Copom) defines the objective for the interest rate (Selic) to manage inflation. The Central Bank uses open market operations to keep Selic near to its objective. The historical data shows that Selic is systematically...

The objective of this article is to discuss a new approach to control for the environment when one estimates efficiency by the stochastic frontier model. By introducing geographical weights and estimating local frontiers for each US saving bank for 2001-09, we find that bank technical...

The unemployment rate is one of the most closely watched economic indicators. However, it has important limitations and shortcomings as a measure of the state of the labour market. This could help to explain the fact that in traditional Phillips curves unemployment explains but a small part of...