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...

The objective is to show that to fulfill the mission of Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) is required to act in improving the financial education of the society. The methodology used in this study comprises steps of focus, collection and analysis, which considers three hypotheses: the mission of BCB...

This paper compares the properties of two particle filters – the Bootstrap Filter and the Auxiliary Particle Filter – applied to the computation of the likelihood of artificial data simulated from a basic DSGE model with nominal and real rigidities. Particle filters are compared in terms of...

We examine exchange-rate pass-through (ERPT) to prices in a model of dispersed information in which the nominal exchange rate imperfectly conveys information about the underlying fundamentals. If the information is complete, ERPT is also complete. Under dispersed information, we derive...

This paper aims to examine the competitive behavior of Brazilian banking industry and through a more individual analysis understand how risk-taking can be affected by banks' market power. Therefore, we compute market power at the bank-level and aggregate this variable in a risk-taking model. Our...

Recent literature has focused on the study of systemic risk in complex networks. It is clear now, after the crisis of 2008, that the aggregate behavior of the interaction among agents is not straightforward and it is very difficult to predict. Contributing to this debate, this paper shows that...