Financial constraints on Brazilian firms are very high compared to advanced economies. In Brazil, 59% of firms have access to a bank loan or a credit line. In developed countries, the average percentage is 95%. Loan collateral requirements are much higher in Brazil (95% of the loan value) than...

A public job can be seen as a source of insurance against income risk. Indeed, many public employees have job stability, which is compounded with less volatile and more compressed wages. Hence, by increasing its number of public employees, the government enhances the overall degree of insurance...

We augment a standard dynamic general equilibrium model with financial frictions, in order to quantify the macroeconomic effects of the credit deepening process observed in Latin America in the last decade - most notably in Brazil. In the model, a stylized banking sector intermediates credit...

This paper introduces cash transfers targeting the poor in an incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents facing idiosyncratic risk. These transfers change the degree of insurance in the economy and affect precautionary motives asymmetrically, leading the poorest households to decrease...

The Covid-19 crisis has lead to a reduction in the demand and supply of sectors that produce goods that need social interaction to be produced or consumed. We interpret the Covid-19 shock as a shock that reduces utility stemming from "social" goods in a two-sector economy with incomplete...

Speculation, in the spirit of Harrison and Kreps [1978], is introduced into a standard real business cycle model. Investors (speculators) hold heterogeneous beliefs about firm growth. Firm ownership, and thus, the firm's discount factor varies with waves of optimism and leverage. These waves...