This paper augments a relatively standard dynamic general equilibrium model with financial frictions in order to quantify the macroeconomic effects of the credit deepening process observed in many Latin American (LA) countries in the last decade, most notably in Brazil. In the model, a stylized...

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...

The number of Covid-19 cases is increasing dramatically worldwide, with several countries experiencing a second and worse wave. Therefore, the availability of reliable forecasts for the number of cases and deaths in the coming days is of fundamental importance. We propose a simple statistical...

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...

We adopt an artificial counterfactual approach to assess the impact of lockdowns on the short-run evolution of the number of cases and deaths in some US states. To do so, we explore the different timing in which US states adopted lockdown policies, and divide them among treated and control...

While most economic studies of crime have focused on its determinants, we study the reverse question: does crime affect economic behavior? Being such an important social phenomenon, one would expect crime to affect economic decisions. Using local data on crime rates and savings per capita in a...

I investigate the optimal auditing scheme for a revenue-maximizing tax-collection agency that observes not only reported pro ts, but also the level of employment at each firm. Each firm is owned by a single entrepreneur whose managerial ability is random. The optimal auditing scheme is...