The estimated interest rate rules are reduced form equations and for that reason they do not directly reveal anything about the structural parameters of monetary policy. In this paper, we seek to further elucidate the Brazilian monetary policy under the inflation targeting regime by calibrating...

The goal of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, this paper shows that the natural rate of interest in a small open economy, with access to the world capital markets, is equal to the international real rate of interest. We show this property by using the infinitely-lived overlapping generations...

When judges are believed to be politically biased, many nasty predictions may derive from it. Economic literature in Brazil shows some controversies over what is the direction of the bias, but mainly, economists believe that courts tend to favor debtors, leading to high disincentives for...

This paper investigates the optimal general income tax and audit policies when poverty is a public bad and income is not observed in an economy with two types of individuals. Dierently from the traditional "non-distortion at the top" result of the optimal taxation literature, we nd that the...

Many local governments allow competition between public and private rms for provision of local public services in order to reduce procurement cost. Competition is usually introduced through competitive tendering for concession contracts. We show that in a symmetric competition between public and...

The key contribution of this paper is to show how to incorporate more information into the empirical strategy in order to avoid the need of valid instruments, which are difficult to find in many instances. I use information on price elasticity to propose a methodology that is able to determine...

In this paper we show a model where fiscal responsibility laws, by reducing the ability of politicians to use public resources for personal gains, can lead to an increase in the supply of public goods. We test this conjecture using data from Brazilian municipalities. As a nationwide...

This paper develops a simple theory of household choices of child labor and schooling. The model is used as a benchmark to read the available empirical evidence and to guide our empirical specification. We argue that part of the conflicting results from the previous literature – related to the...

This paper aims to estimate the equilibrium real exchange rate for the Brazilian economy. The equilibrium exchange rate is defined as the level of exchange rate that guarantees the stability of the net foreign asset position over time. An econometric model is estimated using a Vector Error...

Este artigo desenvolve um modelo de geraçõess sobrepostas e crescimento endógeno com dívida pública onde o governo pode alocar seus gastos de diferentes formas. Assim, para aumentar a parcela de gastos em educação ou infraestrutura como proporção da renda o governo tem de se endividar....