Differences in income-elasticities of imports and exports among countries bring about distinct degrees of external constraints to growth. This argument has been pointed out by Prebisch and by authors in the Kaldorian tradition. Prebisch’s explanations for this phenomenon relate to the...

In this paper, we investigate the distribution of more educated and skilled people in Brazilian municipalities and states. Previous evidence shows a high concentration of college educated and high skilled workers in some areas of the country. We investigate whether the increase in the number of...

This article analyses the roots of the financial crisis caused by the devaluation of the subprime mortgage derivatives, triggered by the reversion of the last cycle of residential constructions in the USA. It describes the process of securitization of the mortgage titles and the boost of the...

The Brazilian federal government has recently set out plans encompassing detailed public expenditure programs and targets on infra-structure investment (PAC, Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento). We investigate the sectoral, regional and national economic consequences of the PAC in Minas...

This article examines the impact of climate change in the Northeast from estimates of the availability of land suitable for agricultural activity in a range of cultures. This information, based on global warming scenarios from the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), are introduced in...

The uniform impatience hypothesis, a joint requirement on endowments and preferences, was imposed in the literature to prove equilibrium existence in infinite horizon sequential economies. In this note, we characterize this assumption in terms of asymptotic properties on inter-temporal discount...

In third generation currency crises models, balance sheet losses from currency depreciations propagate the crises into the real sector of the economy. To test these models, we built a firmlevel database that allowed us to measure currency mismatches around the 2002 Brazilian currency crisis. We...

We study the determinants of the public-private earnings gap for different levels of schooling of Brazilian workers. First, using the current earnings as the variable of interest, we estimate that less educated people receive higher earnings in the public sector (i.e., the earnings gap is...

We exploit a discontinuity in Brazilian municipal election rules to investigate whether political competition has a causal impact on policy choices. In municipalities with less than 200,000 voters mayors are elected with a plurality of the vote. In municipalities with more than 200,000 voters a...