Three nominal exchange rate series are presented, for the mil-reis and the dollar in relation to sterling, and for the mil-reis in relation to the dollar. For each of these, two series are constructed: current rates and long-term rates, representing the secular tendency of these exchange rates....

This paper examines the negotiations which led to the Brussels Convention of 1902 for the abolition of subsidies on sugar exports, showing how the practice of multilateral commodity trade negotiations was an outcome of this experience. Encompassing diverse fiscal systems, these negotiations...

This paper discusses quantitative information as a historiographic instrument: its individual characteristics and those it shows in sets of data, its capacity to describe historical phenomena and the uses historian give to them. It specially examines the sense and limits of quantitative...

The subsidies and protection structure of the sugar sectors in the European Union originated from the individual national protection systems, unified with the creation of the Common Agricultural Policy. The COM for Sugars is based on an intervention price quite higher than international prices....

During the six decades which encompass state planning of the sugar and alcohol industry in Brazil, production quotas were possibly the most important instrument for control of its productive activities. Their distribution obeyed rules, which, though general, contained a clear political...

Demographic statistics were few and unreliable for Brazil and specially for Pernambuco during the XIXth century. This paper discusses some pre- 1872 census statistics, including the creation of public cemeteries, which concentrated information on mortality. Text in Portuguese.

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals can benefit from offering long-term contracts...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...